At the request of many of you, we have combined our massive three-part V5 6k review. This article was originally published in 2003 in three separate articles. The information has now been combined into one long article - resource if you will - on anything and everything you ever wanted to know about the greatest video card that never was.
I’ve got given to me some Voodoo SLI’s of some sort lying in a box some where. Frigging huge double sided boards. I keep them as a reminder and honor of a great pioneering graphics card maker of the late nineties.
Time I got round buying a PC though in 1999 I totally bypassed 3dfx. I was never keen on having seperate 2D and 3D graphics cards and 16-bit colour and bought single slot solutions like a Graphics Blaster Extreme with OpenGL acceleration. After a severly bad experience with an ATI Rage Pro Turbo which has practically put me of ATI cards for life, I got a GeForce 256 SDR. The speed, OpenGL support, features like T&L and stability really impressed me and kept me going for years and I have been buying NVIDIA cards ever since.
I just had to come out of the woodwork to say thanks for that review. Makes me want to go and install my PCI Voodoo5 5500 in my latest build just for kicks.
I threw out both cards last year when I split up with my fiancee - I just didn’t have the storage space.
The Voodoo 1 card was 4MB and I had that as a loop through from Ati Xpert@play 4MB card. Unfortunately the Voodoo 1 card wasn’t that well supported with the games I had and I suppose it hardly go used. It cost around £170 ($300).
Talking about old prices, I found an invoice not long ago for 8MB of SDram (dont think it was EDO) and it was almost £400 ($700)!
Glad you guys are enjoying it. Joel is given credit in the first paragraph. I decided to combine the three original articles into one long resource. Glad to see its paying off.
I lost my voodoo graphics virginity on a 3DFX Voodoo 3 3000 AGP Had a whopping 16mbs of on board RAM and it blitzed half life 1. Back then pretty much all those 3D accelerators were basically just rasterizers and that was it. Geforce changed that with T&L but for the time Voodoo graphics owned all and pretty much pushed power VR out of the market. This article brings back alot of memories. Its weird because 3DFX seemed like in an unassailable position. There was a time briefly during Voodoo 1/Voodoo 2 era where you either ran games hardware accelerated on a 3DFX card or you didnt bother and did it in software at a lower resolution.
Alot of the other 3D accelerator solutions didnt churn out the triangles fast enough. Like the Matrox Mystique. Other cards like the Diamond Stealth required a 2D to run in parallel and those dropped out of the market fairly sharpish. Diamond Stealth was one of the first 3D accelerators and I remember it cost £350 in the UK and came bundled with Virtua Fighter PC upon launch. Nobody could afford it on the basis of just the one game but at the time I remember it being one of the first times where PC games were basically as good as or better looking than their arcade equivilants. It left the Sega Saturn for dust.
I plugged it in the xtremesystems.org news section, might get a few
… still trying to find a rampage for myself. Hard cards to track down for sure.
Well, you won’t find a Rampage, they never managed to get the silicon running unfortunatly. The Voodoo5 6000 was the last operational card 3dfx ever made, and it was never mass produced…
I just spent the time to final read part of the front page.
I remember those articles.
I own a V5500 and even had it running in a system about 3 years ago. Still was a damn good video card.
I have owned several of the SDFX monster cards.
Reflex -
When the 3DFX team broke up, I thought some of them developed cards for Hercules namely the KyroII card.
Not that I am aware of, the KyroII was mostly a product of the PowerVR team as I understand it. I’m sure some employees did move on to companies other than nVidia, but I did not know any of them personally.
The KyroII was an awesome card, 90% of the performance of a GF3 for only about $150 and it required virtually no cooling.
Had a whopping 16mbs of on board RAM and it blitzed half life 1. Back then pretty much all those 3D accelerators were basically just rasterizers and that was it. Geforce changed that with T&L but for the time Voodoo graphics owned all and pretty much pushed power VR out of the market. This article brings back alot of memories. Its weird because 3DFX seemed like in an unassailable position. There was a time briefly during Voodoo 1/Voodoo 2 era where you either ran games hardware accelerated on a 3DFX card or you didnt bother and did it in software at a lower resolution.
