the owner of this GPU was recently offered fifteen thousand dollars by a
collector why I'll tell you why because
it's a ridiculously rare artifact from the early days of 3D gaming the bad news
is the collector wasn't me
good news is that I got my hands on it
anyway
the deal fell through the owner Ross agreed to drive it up to Canada for us
to show it off and as luck would have it it actually works this is the real deal
guys a very late stage prototype of what
would have been 3dfx's final Flagship card the voodoo 5 6000 and this one has
even been reworked by a former 3dfx engineer to reach what we believe would
have been the final spec could this
Beast of a quad GPU card of saved 3dfx
and changed the face of gaming as we know it probably not but that doesn't mean that
we can't fire it up and relive our wildest dreams from a parallel universe
and fire up this message from our sponsor iFixit learn more about the
extremely portable and affordable minnow and moire sets and how they can make
your repair life easier at the end of this video what makes this card really
special is that it's straight from 3dfx themselves making it the best Glide
gaming experience on the planet I mean yes we showed recently that you can
emulate 3dfx Hardware on a modern PC but
so far you can only go up to the voodoo 3. you want to go faster
you're gonna need bare metal
Let's Ride not being a 3dfx historian
myself I wasn't 100 sure what to expect I can tell you that I didn't expect an
external DC Barrel Jack though okay
sure rather than just putting a bigger cooler on the front you just add these little
heatsinks to the back of where the dies are soldered I guess
man I wish we'd done this video even like six months ago you guys would have
been so impressed by the size of this card but now that the 490 exists it's
like make up for it with your personality
here we go it's loud it's right next to
my mic wish I'd thought of that hey nice Athlon XP 2200 plus oh no
is everything working right now like I it captures working and everything
capture is working it's so exciting World of Warcraft
1.12.1 I mean surely we can't play WoW on this
yeah I didn't like that what should we play half-life
if you have a 3D card that incorporates the voodoo 2 or Banshee chip sets you
will want 3dfx mini driver let's go
that is some mighty fine screen tearing
the latency is great and this is Butters
move if I had to guess and this is going to be pretty tough because I'm on a 60hz
display I would say probably 100 to 150
frames per second like it feels very
very low oh get back here
man imagine having this kind of money for a computer back then and like six
hundred dollars for one of these things 600 GPU but it runs like
I just at now it's worth noting that this is a game from 1998. yeah right so
this game came out a couple of years before this even had reached the
Prototype whoa hey hey stop that yeah hence the voodoo 2 and Voodoo Banshee
notes in the option screen there ah okay
this thing absolutely blows away what I would have been using
at the time I know obviously it looks like crap by today's standards but I
wouldn't have been able to believe my eyes if I had seen this back in 2000.
can I just say how painless this was for a prototype graphics card I don't think
it was very painless to get it working to begin with well yeah but it's painless for me now
yeah so go to console and then time demo
as one word space blowout okay here we go
oh look at it go we're gonna find out what the FPS was and this is a much more
demanding scenario than what I was looking at and I feel like I
underestimated it 119 frames per second
oh okay let's try tribes a voodoo card has
been detected If you experience Oddities you should try the wicked GL drivers at
wicked3d.com
oh so first of all 10 24 by 768 right
yep bit depth 16 right can be 16 or 32
well let's go 32 let's go okay I mean obviously we're just gonna
crank everything to high right what could go wrong let's see how many FPS's
we get here plenty we're getting shot down boys
oh wait did I actually die seriously
okay how do I how do I make this go away I
think it's just paused you while it tells you about everything ah
come on oh hey here we go we got something to fight play Master let's go
what the what the crap am I even firing
it's a bouncy ball oh my goodness bouncing up the thing oh I got one it's
running shockingly well that is to say the performance is great on that era
games and kind of problem free
as far as I can tell for flipping gpus
uh um Benchmark I mean she's running it
Yep this is about what I remember this looking like
I remember this second run through oops uh-oh okay mostly Problem free
I thought this was pulled from an actual Matrix game at the time
I don't think are you sure I don't you're making me doubt myself
I mean the reflections are all looking okay kinda nope you're totally right
it's just a matrix inspired demo so why
Shazam you okay hold on a second did we
faster and faster than a Ferrari and more reliable that that PC World ad in
the bottom love it I remember this running a lot better on
Hardware a couple of years later oh boy yikes I think software rendering would
be actually faster oops no Hardware support rip
we'll talk about that later oops no Hardware support just doesn't do bump
mapping at all we'll talk about that later or not yet pixel Shader no
Hardware support rip hey 26 47 3D marks
let's go there it is yep that's why it was so
slow if you ran 2000 it would actually like probably be pretty good basically
NVIDIA having that was a killer app for them what a cool trip to 3D gaming
Christmas past but believe it or not this isn't the only time machine there
are other brand new voodoo 5 6000s that are available today for a fraction of
the cost of this one Russian modern Anthony zx64 has made a name for himself
refurbishing and modding vintage gpus and the voodoo 5 6000 rebuild is his
crowning achievement not only did he build his reproduction with only a
non-working prototype for reference he actually improved the design by doubling
the vram to 256 megabytes though it
should be noted that Anthony recommends using the onboard jumper to fall back to
128 Megs to improve compatibility with older games
genuine 3dfx Hardware or not though this thing was wicked fast at the time even
if the truth is that the voodoo 56000 was destined for failure before it even
got to this prototyping phase so here's the thing 3dfx had a wealth of
experience using multiple gpus together to make FPS number go up but the fact is
the single GPU competition was getting good really good and in 2001 the GeForce
2 and Radeon 8000 showed up with both strong performance and a new technology
that would radically change the graphical Fidelity of video games shaders
this meanwhile lack shaders and was
expected to cost an estimated 600 US dollars at retail Unthinkable at the
time even if it sounds pretty good today so as amazing as it was that's a turd
that absolutely will not polish
how did 3dfx get to this point they were the Undisputed Kings of the 3D gaming
space from 1996 onward to understand that we have to understand why they were
the Kings because it's not like they were the first incumbents like matrox
ATI and S3 had their own 3D boards and
Renditions Veritas series came out at around the same time and unlike 3dfx's
early cards none of those required a separate video card just to run the 2D
desktop two gpus one for 3D one for 2D
3dfx actually came into this Market with a huge disadvantage but what they had
was as perfect a blend of features and performance as you could possibly expect
at the time not only did the voodoo 1 sport a faster fill rate than its
competitors it had Hardware support for Z buffer depth information bilinear
texture filtering anti-aliasing and it boasted higher resolution higher color
output these are all things that other cards either relied on the CPU to do for
them or just straight up couldn't do at all which meant that you could run a
much lower tier processor like even a 486 and still get an enjoyable 3D
experience I mean to be clear unlike today a dedicated 3D accelerator wasn't
necessary to play most games but if you
used full software rendering you'd be stuck at super low video quality I'm
talking 320 by 240 256 colors if you
were lucky Voodoo to the rescue then and a big part
of their special sauce was the way that they wrapped these advantages into a
relatively easy to program package with the Glide API remember guys this is in
the days before direct 3D or widespread
opengl support so each vendor had their own API that game developers needed to
support but Glide was surprisingly similar to opengl in both syntax and
feature set limited though it was so if a game developer had to program in
support for each vendor's API well they were far more likely to support Glide
over say s 3D or Redline this almost
immediately gave 3dfx a special place in the hearts of Gamers even if the API was
proprietary 3dfx then subsequently enjoyed a virtual monopoly in the 3D
gaming space while the competition either made expensive gambles or sat
with their development effectively on pause while they waited for the first
direct 3D specification the nv1 for example from NVIDIA used a wildly
different rendering mode than direct 3D would eventually use forcing NVIDIA to
scrap their nv2 and then start playing catch-up but while 3dfx became well
known for their robust feature set easy development and their multi-GPU scanline
interleave or SLI which allowed for higher frame rates and resolutions than
anyone else success seemed like a paralyzing Force for them and by the
time of the voodoo 3 things started to take a turn with direct 3D and clearer
opengl specifications to Target the competition was catching up and fast and
in some cases even surpassing 3dfx's offerings for example NVIDIA's Riva tnt2
brought competitive performance 32-bit color rendering and maximum texture
sizes that were eight times larger than the voodoo 3 which could still only
display 16-bit color in game meanwhile 3dfx rather than investing in GPU r d
invested in a Litany of side projects and attempts to Stave off the
competition the failed bid to provide chips for the Sega Dreamcast was a major
blow that ended in a lawsuit and while the terms weren't disclosed Sega had
intended to purchase the rights to use 3dfx's technology so as to prevent the
competition from being able to and it's likely they got their way you can get
your way by the way with a desk pad from ltdstore.com same price any size and now
available in our stealthy circuit pattern and while they didn't know it
then 3dfx's 1998 purchase of their biggest board partner stb systems ended
up being not the monopolistic takeover of the market that many feared but
rather the beginning of their end in effect it changed 3dfx's relationship
with their board Partners from chipset provider partner to competitor which
incentivized their Partners to support the real competition primarily NVIDIA
and ATI whose rapid Hardware development Cycles became popular with system
integrators like HP and Dell which 3 3D
effects had no interest in catering to so without chips going into game
consoles and with their board partners mutinying and taking over the system
space 3dfx was left in the unenviable position of relying on only the
Enthusiast segment as their customers and better options were now beginning to
emerge for them as well perhaps seeing the writing on the wall 3dfx purchased
gigapixel in mid-2000 after that company
lost its bid to provide chips for the original Xbox the idea it seems was to
finally get their next-gen GPU Rampage across the finish line that GPU had been
in development since 1998 and had it released when 3dfx would have liked it
to it's possible that they could have stayed competitive with the GeForce 2
that they were staring down in 2000 unfortunately for them their creditors
were fed up by Year's End voting for bankruptcy and liquidating the company
NVIDIA would go on to acquire all of their intellectual property pretty
bitter pill to swallow the parallels between 3dfx's downfall and NVIDIA's
behavior lately is kind of ironic if you think about it because they've been going down a very similar path
antagonizing their board Partners diverting attention to side businesses
like crypto mining autonomous vehicles machine learning you get it but
fortunately for NVIDIA it seems like they've got a wide enough mode around
them and enough cash on hand to whether pretty much an apocalypse and there are
no existential threats to them like 3D effects faced during their decline at
least not yet this my friends is why competition is so
important in the industry because it can and will light a fire under a company
that's grown complacent like 3dfx did if
they'd had less debt if they'd gotten the Sega contract or simply made
different decisions who knows what might have happened when the competition heated up a 3dfx forced to compete well
they still could might have survived unfortunately for this timeline they
chose the voodoo 5. and I choose this segue to our sponsor iFixit if you're
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in the description and buy yours today if you enjoyed this video go check out
our video on the 3dfx voodoo 2 SLI gaming setup for a little more on just
how good 3dfx used to be and how much they allowed to slip through their
fingers