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Voodoo 5 6000 remade

Gerard

Gerard

Gerard

Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
41,648
Location
Ireland
https://hothardware.com/news/3dfx-voodoo-5-6000-recreated-by-enthusiast-vsa-100

g61WDK5.webp


Impressive to say the least, he reverse engineered an original voodoo 5 6000 and came up with a newer design for it, apparently the vsa 100 chips are still readily available for sale as well.


Slight update on this, the card in the OP wasn't a one off, he's apparently making a few more along with packaging and putting them up for sale for around $1500 U.S.

https://www.modlabs.net/forum/topic/60674/
 
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Dontrocktheboat said:
I blamed Nvidia back in the day for not being able to buy the 6000 series.
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More down to bad management on the 3dfx side. Rampage kept getting delayed due to getting features added and engineers diverted from it to work on stopgap products, buying stb so they could produce their own cards and cutting off their partners was the final nail in the coffin for them. A pity as the specs of rampage had it looking to be a total beast, nvidia didn't have anything rivalling it until some of the high end geforce 4 models.

From the 3dfx dodge garage:

1 Rampage chip w/64MB $200 USD
1 Rampage/1 Sage w/64MB $300 USD
2 Rampage/1 Sage w/128MB $500 USD

Note- The flagship product Specter 3000 would have been a killer piece of hardware for the time frame. 2 Rampage chips in SLI mode with Sage combined with DDR ram would have had 10.2 GB/S bandwidth with a fillrate of 1600-2000Mpixels/S.

To give you a point of reference Nvidia didn't have anything matching these performance specs till some Geforce 4 models were released years later.
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41

I still remember some of the comments at the time when the voodoo 5 6k was first shown, "omg that will kill airflow" was one of the main ones along with comments about the external power supply (as opposed to today where you would need to spend more on a psu for some gpu's, that card was going to come with it's own yet that was somehow a negative for some people). A 4 gpu card was insane at the time and still mental today, but it would work because of how their sli worked, vs the later multi gpu variations.

Pity it never officially at least seen the light of day, even the ones that did get out the door later on still had unresolved bugs that were never worked out, presumably the software was never really fully written for release standard drivers supporting 4 gpu's.
 
chaparral said:
51 here :o:o:o

I had the voodoo 1, Voodoo 2, Voodoo 3000 or 3500 AGP (Think that was the name back then), and Voodoo 5 5500

If i remember right the voodoo card colour was only 16 bit where Nvidia cards were 32-bit
and then there was a big thing about nvidia GPU's supporting T&L (think T&L what it was called)
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At the time 32 bit colour introduced a performance penalty so 3dfx held off on supporting it until later, i think they had 24 bit colour support which was meant to be close to 32 bit in looks but less of a performance impact, the voodoo 3 series (avenger) used this method. The napalm series (voodoo 4500 and 5500) afaik did support 32 bit colour.

Hardware transform and lighting's main benefit was it shifted more load to the gpu and freed up cpu cycles, but the extent to which it done this was overblown from what i can remember.
 
Pottsey said:
That was yet another feature they copied not pioneered :) Sorry as an old school fanboy I couldn't help it.
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So power vr had a monopoly on anti aliasing did they? Was wondering how long it would take before you appeared out of thin air to spout that line.
 
Pottsey said:
At first yes as PowerVR where the ones that pioneered FSAA and pioneered free FSAA and for a while had a monopoly. Its just some 3DFX fans like to forget that and credit 3DFX with coming up with FSAA.
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Probably because it worked better teamed with sli, 2x the grunt to help soak up the performance hit. As for anti aliasing itself i don't ever recall seeing anything saying that any one company invented it. Different companies came up with different methods yes but i think the tech itself was floating about for a while before it got used.
 
Hotwired said:
That's some obscure nostalgia to imitate an old circuit board.
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Improved on it if anything, solid state capacitors etc.


Cyber-Mav said:
These old cards should stay in the past where they belong. They are useless in this day and age.
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Buzz Killington has arrived..:rolleyes: How are they useless if people are making older builds with hardware of the time to play games of the time?
 
d_brennen said:
Hope LGR gets his hands on it for a video
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There has been reviews of them in the past but ultimately they're a bit pointless as the cards were never really finalised and still had bugs to work out. Even this one suffers with the same bugs as a real 6k.
 
Harlequin said:
Which is why it has the power brick.... and those power points were addons for the 3700 rev boards only, the earlier ones, like my own rev 2600 didnt have them
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I think I read the power brick caused some issues on some versions of the card. I think it was Hank Semenec that mentioned the direct wiring was a safer alternative, he was reworking quite a few boards to be functional. Think they're all long gone now. =/
 
Harlequin said:
I cant test it or use it now (agp, and its been in a box for 17 years) - but when i ran it, it had working motion blue in Q3 on a few test maps - could use FXT1 textures in serous sam as well. Would like to see RGSS in 2021 tbh , as Nv is using OGSS for its DSR
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You have one of the old boards it was compatible with? I was gonna snag one around 2003-ish for i think £600 from Hank, but it seemed like there were only so many motherboards it would work properly on, mainly due to the 6k boards being engineering samples of different revisions and support. Of course now looking back i wish i had bought it.
 
Harlequin said:
Yes, i ran it on my 2002 vintage Athlon 600 system *back in the day* Socket A. No dont have that anymore, it is very much long gone (about the time i got rid of BT Home Highway, ISDN internet )
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So its a box queen now then? Shame. Not easy to even get older motherboards as capacitors on them can be dodgy, and on the card itself over time. I know there was an odd adapter that was knocking about years ago that made agp compatible with pci so might be something it would work with, i remember a guy in the x3dfx forums using one though cant recall if it was for a 5500 or 6000.
 
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