Last week, a collector put a rare 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000 graphics card up for auction on eBay. This is a fully functional prototype and engineering work by his former 3dfx employee Jindrich Semenec has made the card work with his 8xFSAA. The bid quickly surpassed him $12,000, The final sale price came to $15,000 (opens in new tab)Here’s what we know so far:
I originally purchased the card from a friend, as the seller is something of a holy grail for graphics card collectors. However, as time went on, they felt that he didn’t have much of an emotional attachment to the Voodoo 5 6000, so they decided to put the card up for auction so someone else could enjoy it.
It uses the long-discontinued AGP 4X interface, so you won’t be able to run the card on modern PCs. AGP saw a rapid decline in use with the introduction of PCI Express in 2003, but the Voodoo 5 series of cards first appeared in 2000 and 3dfx filed for bankruptcy in his 2002. You might be able to run Voodoo 5 6000 in it.
In terms of specs, the card uses four Napalm 30 architecture VSA-100 chips running at 166 MHz. Each chip has two pixel shaders and no vertex shader (because it didn’t exist in 2000). There are also two texturing units and two rendering outputs (ROPs) per chip, and the card uses SLI (Scan Line Interleaving instead of Nvidia Scalable Link Interface) to make use of all four chips. Each GPU was also paired with 32 MB of SDR memory running at the same 166 MHz as the GPU cores for a total of 128 MB.
The VSA-100 chip is manufactured on a 250nm process and is approximately 112mm^2 in size with only 14 million transistors per chip. Even the lowest of modern integrated graphics solutions use far more transistors, but many of them perform AVC, HEVC, and/or AV1 encoding in addition to their various graphics roles. It is directed to /decoding support, etc. With a total of 4 chips, the Voodoo 5 6000 has a power rating of up to 60W.
The card can draw most of the power it needs through the AGP connection, but it does have a barrel-style external power adapter. Also note that the only output available is the single VGA connector, which is not surprising given the age of the hardware.
How fast is the Voodoo 5 6000 compared to modern graphics cards? Ignoring the lack of support for newer APIs (DirectX 6 was the biggest at the time), you can’t beat the record. Using 4 pixel shaders at 166 MHz gives a theoretical performance of 2.66 Gigaops per second. According to the GPU benchmark hierarchy, this would be roughly on par with his 2002-launched Radeon 9700. (opens in new tab).
Alternatively, you may need to add additional “ops” to ROPS and TMU. Suffice it to say that the Voodoo 5 6000 won’t run Windows 11 or any recent games remotely…but that’s assuming you even want to… something that actually works.
Either way, this is certainly a rare piece of gaming history.3dfx Interactive was one of the driving forces behind early 3D games on the PC, and was even used in some arcade machines in the late ’90s. . RIP, 3dfx, voodoo.
We’re trying to get additional details about who purchased the card, so if you’re one of the two people involved and would like to talk, drop me a note.
