Last week, a collector put up a rare 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000 graphics card for auction on eBay. This was a fully functional prototype, with engineering work from former 3dfx employee Jindrich Semenec to get the card working with 8xFSAA. Bidding quickly eclipsed $12,000, and the final sale price ended up at $15,000. Here's what we know for now.
The seller purchased the card originally from a friend, as it was something of a holy grail for graphics card collectors. Over time, however, they felt there wasn't quite as much emotional attachment to the Voodoo 5 6000, and so they decided to put the card up for auction so that someone else could enjoy it.
Getting the card running in a modern PC isn't possible, as it uses the long since discontinued AGP 4X interface. AGP rapidly dwindled in use with the advent of PCI Express in 2003, though the Voodoo 5 series of cards first appeared in 2000, and 3dfx filed for bankruptcy in 2002. But if you have an old Pentium III or similar rig still kicking around, you could potentially still run the Voodoo 5 6000 in it.
As for specs, the card uses four of the Napalm 30 architecture VSA-100 chips clocked at 166 MHz. Each chip features two pixel shaders and no vertex shaders (as those weren't around in 2000). There are also two texturing units and two render outputs (ROPs) per chip, and the card used SLI — Scan Line Interleaving, not the Nvidia Scalable Link Interface — to put all four chips to use. Each GPU was also paired with 32MB of SDR memory running at the same 166 MHz as the GPU core, for a total of 128MB.
The VSA-100 chips were fabricated on a 250nm process, with a size of around 112mm^2 and just 14 million transistors per chip. Even the lowest of integrated graphics solutions these days will use far more transistors, though a lot of those go toward things like AVC, HEVC, and/or AV1 encoding/decoding support, in addition to the various graphics duties. With four chips total, the Voodoo 5 6000 was rated at up to 60W of power use — try not to let it go to your head!
While the card could pull most of the needed power over the AGP connection, it does feature a barrel-style external power adapter. Note also that the only output available is a single VGA connector, though that's no surprise considering the age of the hardware.
Just how fast would the Voodoo 5 6000 be compared to modern graphics cards? Even if we ignore the lack of support for newer APIs (DirectX 6 was the maximum at the time), it's not going to set any records. Four pixel shaders at 166 MHz yields a theoretical performance of 2.66 Giga-ops per second. That would put it roughly on par with the Radeon 9700 that came out in 2002, according to our GPU benchmarks hierarchy.
Or maybe we need to add in some additional "ops" for the ROPS and TMUs — honestly, it's been so long since we moved to unified shaders that I hardly remember how they might compare with newer GPUs. Suffice it to say you won't be running Windows 11 or any remotely recent games on the Voodoo 5 6000. But that's assuming you even want to, as more likely than not this will end up enshrined on a shelf rather than sitting in a PC that can actually be used.
Whatever the case, this is certainly a rare piece of gaming history. 3dfx Interactive was one of the driving forces behind early 3D games on PC, and it also powered some arcade machines in the late 90s. RIP, 3dfx and Voodoo.
We're trying to get additional details on who purchased the card, so if you're one of the two involved parties and would like to talk, drop me a note.
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