3dfx Voodoo 5 9000

An obvious fake and a prank, it could have fooled more though if he ran a game other than Crysis. His trick fell apart when he tried running a DX9 game on a pre DX7 hardware! Nice effort none the less.

 

April 1st prank, I assume?

I might well have been taken in by it today (if posted on the 1st I would probably have been hella suspicious), if it wasn't for his four AGP slot mobo (which never existed to my knowledge; all mobos I ever saw only had 1 AGP slot), the excessive fan noise/air agitation (those tiny fans weren't noisy, nor powerful) and Crysis... Like already mentioned; pre-DX7 hardware, no way it could run DX9 or was it 10 game.

But it was a damn good effort. Is it a digital special effect, or a genuine actual physical prop card? So I applaud the effort. Very well done!

 

Semi-related: after 3dfx demise, never-released Rampage had obtained mythical proportions/ memedom among the die-hard faithful, with claims that it would have outperformed multiple subsequent generations of Nvidia/ATI hardware. That being said, I am holding out hope that high-end GPUs slated for release this year may finally match the Rampage, ending our near-two-decade waking nightmare.

 

is this the buster sword of GPUs

 

Shit yeah, it lasted not just for years, but nearly decades. Incredible tenacity, with scraps of alleged testimony of function and performance of prototypes trickling out of obscurity like dead sea scroll fragments. It would not surprise me if some of that talk will start up again now that the name of the beast has been mentioned, like Candyman (...or Shai'tan, perhaps...)

 

Wasn't there someone on this very forum who persisted with that nonsense for years?

 

Was he a Texan?

 

What exactly was it that killed Rampage anyway, too much feature creep, and then 3dfx plain ran out of money? I've forgotten, it was too long ago. Did the Voodoo 4/5s really sell that bad...?

 

I can't remember exactly, but I do remember the insane amount of hyperbole and excitement going around about Rampage and Sage after they closed their doors.

 

Indeed, VSA-100 was a stopgap and it also came several months late, due to thermal issues that made the chip totally unreliable.

On top of that, they got too ambitious and started selling complete boards under the STB brand directly to consumers and PC builders, screwing the other vendors in the process (Interestingly, this is the same mistake made by another former industry leader, S3 Inc., which purchased Diamond Multimedia around the same time). This happened in early 1999: Voodoo 3 was the first 3dfx board available only through STB with the exception of the entry level Voodoo 3 1000 (a castrated, underclocked chip) which was the only one still available to third parties and that even made its way into a couple of motherboard as 'integrated' graphics.

But while I think the demise of 3DFX was totally deserved, the rise of NVidia always puzzled me. Their TNT was incapable of offering true trilinear filtering (resorting to checkerboard mip mapping) and it took the greatest performance hit when switching to 32 bits. The GeForce 1/2 were fast for the time and while Nvidia finally got trilinear filtering right, with certain textures types (like DXTC) they interpolated colors in 16 bit, resulting in severe banding artifacts instead of smooth gradients. Quake III running on NVidia cards was easily recognizable for the ugly banding everywhere. Meanwhile Ati, S3, Matrox and 3DFX, while not as fast, they delivered very good quality... Somehow NVidia always managed to get away with poor IQ traded for speed (either because the hardware was not quite up to the task or because of drivers, like in the GeForceFX days)

Had 3DFX and S3 not taken the steps toward their suicide, probably NVidia wouldn't have achieved total dominance in a matter of two years.

 

I'm inclined to say clever marketing and probably something else too...

If you go back look at the reviews of the time, you will see NVIDIA hardware incensed for its 32 bit rendering mode (despite the very obvious quality issues) and framerate. The typical reviewer of the day nitpicked on things like the G400 using by default a 16 bit buffer instead of a 32 bit one (note that developers could still set them up independently via API call, unlike on the TNT where the depth of the Z buffer was linked to the delth of the frame buffer) or about 3dfx still using 16 bit while their IQ looked miles ahead than NVidia own 32 bit modes.

That was the time when many online enthusiast sites and HiTech media outlets were born, and it was still in a stage of 'cottage industry', with lot and enthusiasm and passion poured in but with little money. I always got the impression than all this benevolence towards NVidia was also because they were better at... promoting their products with gifts, free review cards and possibly other benefits.

 

Marketing, price, and speed.

The rendering on TNT and Riva 128 wasn't good compared to 3dfx, but it was generally better the other competition. From a speed standpoint it was at least competitive with 3dfx and blew most of the other competition out of the water. And finally, it was generally cheaper than 3dfx (especially Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo 2 where you also had to buy a 2d card).

I stuck with the VSA-100 based V5 5500 as image quality with RGSSAA was far superior to anything the Geforce 2 could do, especially when it came to texture shimmer and texture crawl in addition to cleaning up edges. Unfortunately that also meant taking a big hit in speed compared to a Geforce 2. I had been hoping that Geforce 2 would be a significant upgrade over Geforce 256 (especially WRT to IQ), but it wasn't to be. So I quickly sold my Geforce 2 after upgrading from a Geforce 256. I'd also gotten a V5 5500 to try it out and while the speed was disappointing, the image quality absolutely blew me away.

At the time, for most gamers, image quality was a very distant second to how fast you could run a game, so VSA-100 based cards couldn't do much to get the attention of most gamers.

Regards,
SB

 

As much as tech enthusiasts hated them, nVidia launched untold millions of cut down TNT2 M64s, geforce 2 MX, geforce "4" MX4x0 and FX 5200's. Every god damned Dell, HP, Compaq etc PC of that time frame; if you crack it open there is one of the above cards in there and I'm barely exagerating. It was barely more expensive than a 2D card and for the time, the performance was acceptable for light gaming.

E.g. the TNT2 M64 was a little less than half as fast as the TNT2 ultra, or a voodoo 2 SLI or Voodoo 3 2000. Knock the resolution down 1 step from 800x600 to 640x480 and use 16 bit colours and you're out ahead framerate wise; if you're comming from software rendering straight to the TNT2 M64 because dell stuck it in your next OEM PC, the blury trilinear approximation with weird dithering like artifacts doesn't bother you.

Go on ebay and try this experiment: search for a couple of cards of that time and count how many you find that are real hits.
Geforce 256, 3.
Voodoo 5, 5.
Voodoo 2, 26.
Geforce 3, 15.
TNT2, 622, nearly all M64s.

Geforce 3's and voodoo 5's etc have some collectors value and might be a fun toy for a windows 98 SE retro PC. I understand why people might want one and I understand why you'd try to sell one; it's worth something. TNT2 M64s have little reason to be sold on ebay at all and are available for almost nothing in great abundance. That if anything discourages many from trying to sell TNT2 M64s, so the true abundance of these cards is probably underestimated. As far as I'm concerned the TNT2 M64 is what made nVidia. If you bought a complete PC at the time and didn't explicitly go out of your way and pay extra for a better graphics card, you had a TNT2 M64.

 

\slides into thread

You called?

 

This amazing Voodoo 5 9000 with its 32 3dfx VSA-100 chips is capable of a whopping 1.3Tbit/s of memory bandwidth and performing 106 billion texels per second! Compare that to the nVidia Titan V with its puny 1.7Tbit/s of memory bandwidth and mere 384 billion texels per second. Today's single-GPU video cards have no chance.