Should you assume video games like Halo and Grand Theft Auto are “retro,” you’ve in all probability by no means heard of 3DFX. It was a scrappy little firm that competed with Nvidia within the early days of discrete graphics playing cards for house PCs. Whereas the Voodoo collection of GPUs can nearly deal with a contemporary model of Tetris (when you depart ray tracing off), they had been beloved again within the 90s…a lot so that somebody simply spent an enormous chunk of money simply to personal one of many final 3DFX prototype playing cards.
The Voodoo 5 6000 was 3DFX’s ultimate GPU design earlier than the corporate was offered to Nvidia. Based on Wikipedia, there have been a bit over 100 of the experimental graphics playing cards created in 2000. The previous few of those playing cards had been meant to be the ultimate retail model, however they by no means made it to retailer cabinets.
A model of the cardboard with the working quantity 3700, a near-final revision, popped up on eBay a few weeks in the past. It was offered out of Washington state and noticed by KitGuru. The vendor claims to be a collector who may “personally verify” that the cardboard runs in appropriate {hardware} and that it was personally revised by 3DFX engineer Hank Semenec. The profitable bidder paid a pleasant, even $15,000 for a chunk of non-public pc historical past. Transport was free.
The Voodoo 5 6000 linked to motherboards utilizing the now-extinct Superior Graphics Port, packing a whopping 128 megabytes of reminiscence and a GPU clock of 166MHz. It could have been the primary GPU to mix 4 processors and reminiscence banks to hit these numbers. Its massive promoting level was to be the power to run full-scene anti-aliasing at 8X to keep away from “jaggies.” The auctioned-off unit included a customized adapter cable to energy the cardboard through a Molex plug.
