Posted on Thursday, February 18 2021 @ 21:07 CET by Thomas De MaesschalckMany of 3dfx's final products never hit the market. In the year 2000, the company was working on the Voodoo 5 6000, an over-the-top card that is remembered as a last-ditch effort to remain in the high-end video card market.
The Voodoo 5 6000 was never officially released but about 1,000 cards were produced and these are sometimes sold on auction sites. HotHardware reports a hardware enthusiast who goes by the name "Anthony" has created his own Voodoo 5 6000 video card.
This feat is possible because 3dfx VSA-100 graphics processors are still readily available, you can find them in bulk on eBay for just under $20 per chip. Four of these graphics processors are needed to make the Voodoo 5 6000 and each chip has 32MB SDRAM, resulting in 128MB of memory for the full card -- an incredible amount of memory in 2000.
With the help of some reverse engineering, Anthony created a custom PCB and managed to create a card that performs exactly like the original Voodoo 5 6000. It has the same BIOSes, same drivers, and same bugs. No real Voodoo 5 6000 cards were damaged to reach this feat.
According to a Mod Labs Chief Administrator, some of the issues inherent to the Voodoo 5 6000 (and are replicated with Anthony recreation) are:HotHardware says there have been no recently completed auctions for the Voodoo 5 6000 so it's hard to put a value on an original card. However, a brand new sealed box with the Voodoo 5 5500 (which has two VSA-100 processors) recently sold for $1,300 on eBay.
Color distortion and artifacts in games on some platforms and driver versions The presence of translucent stripes on the screen in high-speed modes of operation Miscellaneous compatibility and speed issues
