Voodoo 5 6000

[TheWheelman]

Let's just talk about it. Share knowledge of what could have been.

Also, if anyone wants to bring up other could-have-been-but-weren't products from 3Dfx, feel free.

[chrismeyer]

if 3dfx wasnt in financial trouble and released it it would of sold very well

[Gromuhl'Djun]

I don't know about that. It would have been released on the same time as the Geforce 3, which was faster, had pixel shaders, lesser power requirements and was smaller, while the voodoo didn't even have Hardware T&L..

[GhostXL]

i dunno about that...thats cuz they had 3dfx Glide..which was much faster.... I had a voodoo5 5500 AGP 8x and the thing flew. It was much faster than my friends G2. I had that voodoo5 in a P3 1ghz at the time of its peak. I loved that machine...

Many good times with the original Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, Heretic 2, American McGees Alice (fun game, and still is) etc.

[Gromuhl'Djun]

Here some interesting benches:
http://www.x86-secret.com/articles/d...0/v56kgb-7.htm

http://www.sudhian.com/index.php?/articles/show/413

[TheWheelman]

Whoa whoa whoa, the V5 6000 would have blown anything out of the water in Glide, yes, but the question is... do we use glide today?
If 3Dfx was alive today, what would the industry have leaned towards?

[Vykupitel]

Is known that they prepare GLIDE to be open sourced. So I think this could be good in fight towards direct x and also for developers. I owned V56k for some years and was very good card and also power consumption wasn't so big.
I have AGP Daytona with VSA-101 and this card could compete in low-end very good against GF4-MX. I run at 166MHz at default and I run this baby on 204MHz flawlessly, more frequency wasn't possible because the DDR1 chips was the limit. But I know from former 3dfx enginner (creator of Daytona card) that they run this card in lab on 270MHz with proper DDR1 chips.

[Havokie]

The Voodoo 5 didn't even support Hardware T&L.....at the time it would have come out, none of the big games supported Glide so it would have lost out to the GF and Radeon series in all the huge titles like (at the time) Battlefield 1942 and Medal of Honor Allied Assault.

Voodoo cards were great, when Glide was supported.....but without hardware T&L, I don't think the Voodoo 5 would ever have been as good a product as its earlier predecessors.

Plus it was an absolutely monster of a card, biggest agp card ever? It's about 160% the size of a Geforce or FX series card, with multiple fans!

[Vykupitel]

GeforceFX wasn't competitor to V56k, it was GF2. And For GF3 there was project Rampage. And I'm not sure it T/L in games in these days had a great boost in performance. I played Giants which supports T/L on V56k and GF2 Pro with similar FPS. So T/L in this time was only for 3Dmark which impact score for card automatically when there was no support for that. T/L unit in GF2 wasn't so strong,so non-T/L card could compete in triangle output if it will be with fast CPU.
But you right. open sourcing of GLIDE was late and majority of new games was OGL or DX engines but as you know in engines like UT2k3 and later depends rendering platform on renderer which could be easily worked for GLIDE if GLIDE will be supporting shaders. Also 3dfx wants to focused on OpenGL primarily after open sourcing GLIDE because GLIDE and OGL have many thing common.

[Havokie]

Just to point out, I was just referring to the size of the cards when I mentioned how big it was, not that is was competing with the FX cards....just to clarify that!

[TheWheelman]

Originally Posted by Vykupitel

GeforceFX wasn't competitor to V56k, it was GF2. And For GF3 there was project Rampage. And I'm not sure it T/L in games in these days had a great boost in performance. I played Giants which supports T/L on V56k and GF2 Pro with similar FPS. So T/L in this time was only for 3Dmark which impact score for card automatically when there was no support for that. T/L unit in GF2 wasn't so strong,so non-T/L card could compete in triangle output if it will be with fast CPU.
But you right. open sourcing of GLIDE was late and majority of new games was OGL or DX engines but as you know in engines like UT2k3 and later depends rendering platform on renderer which could be easily worked for GLIDE if GLIDE will be supporting shaders. Also 3dfx wants to focused on OpenGL primarily after open sourcing GLIDE because GLIDE and OGL have many thing common.

I like how you mentioned the Rampage.

What else can you tell us about the Rampage?

[FlawleZ]

Originally Posted by Havokie

Just to point out, I was just referring to the size of the cards when I mentioned how big it was, not that is was competing with the FX cards....just to clarify that!

The FX line isn't the largest. I do believe the 8800GTX's are now the largest and the 7800GTX 512MB is coming in close behind that.

[Vykupitel]

Originally Posted by TheWheelman

I like how you mentioned the Rampage.

What else can you tell us about the Rampage?

Everything what I know about Rampage I know from former 3dfx engineer. I had this baby in my hands. Only 3 prototype boards was made before 3dfx asset was sold to nVidia.

Technology:

2D / Video:
128 bit graphic core
HW acceleration DVD (Motion Compensation, Planar to packed pixel conversion)
640*480 / 160Hz; 1600*1200 / 100Hz; (2048*1536 / 85 Hz ?)

3D:
52 bit internal precision rendering (13bit per each RGBA component)
32 bit color output
32 bit color textures support
24 bit FP Z-Buffer
8 bit Stencil Buffer
Textures Resolution up-to 2048x2048
Texture Compression DXT, FXT
Single-Pass Bilinear / Trilinear texture filtering
Anisotropic Filtering (16x max. ~ 128tap)
Single-Pass & Single Cycle Multi Texturing
Single-Pass & Single Cycle Bump Mapping
Alpha Blending
Pixel Shader 1.1
Line / Edge AntiAliasing
Full-Scene AntiAliasing: MultiSampling (4x per Rampage, 800 MSamples/s)
Full-Scene AntiAliasing: Rotated-Grid Super Sampling
Flat / Gourard Shading
LOD MipMapping
Sub-Pixel & Sub-Texel Correction
Programmable Fog Effects
T-Buffer (all effects from VSA-100)
M-Buffer (for Multi Sample-AntiAliasing)
HW supported HSR

SAGE:
25 HW lights
Vertex Shader

Options:

AGP-4
64MB DDR per chip
passive cooling do 200 MHz

API, rendering:

MS Direct 3D over 8.0 spec.
3Dfx Glide
SGI OpenGL

Also there are alpha drivers on which Rampage can run in 2D in W2k. Source code for them is also available but no one worked on them to run more 3D features.
A week before 3dfx went out of business there was Rampage successfully running Quake3 in lab on experimental OpenGL ICD. They had this card almost ready and this card would be on market as first card which support pixel shaders a year before GF3 launch!!! but is only IF....

[Havokie]

Originally Posted by FlawleZ

The FX line isn't the largest. I do believe the 8800GTX's are now the largest and the 7800GTX 512MB is coming in close behind that.

Again, that wasn't my point. I was just generally speaking about cards in and around the same time as the Voodoo 5 that alot of people would have had. (I know an fx5200 came out long, long time afterwards but its a very common card for comparison purposes.)

[DSparil]

Although I was a huge 3dfx fan back in the day, I think the V5 6000 would not have boded well. After the V5 5500, I believe the company needed to depart from the VSA-100 chipset design and go next generation with a faster, higher frame rate producing chipset. Granted, the glide API produced higher fps in games that supported so, but for the then and future, the RivaTNT 2 and subsequent Geforce line of cards were overall faster and had hardware T&L.

Not to mention the V5 6000 was freakin huge, and a power hog as well. I would have had to buy a separate generator to keep that thing juiced up

[Havokie]

What were the power requirements, actually, if anyone knows? Which Voodoo card has the external power unit, or was that merely a planned unit that never made it? I can't remember...

[chrismeyer]

it was the voodoo 5 6000 that had the external power adapter

[TheWheelman]

Originally Posted by Vykupitel

Everything what I know about Rampage I know from former 3dfx engineer. I had this baby in my hands. Only 3 prototype boards was made before 3dfx asset was sold to nVidia.

Technology:

2D / Video:
128 bit graphic core
HW acceleration DVD (Motion Compensation, Planar to packed pixel conversion)
640*480 / 160Hz; 1600*1200 / 100Hz; (2048*1536 / 85 Hz ?)

3D:
52 bit internal precision rendering (13bit per each RGBA component)
32 bit color output
32 bit color textures support
24 bit FP Z-Buffer
8 bit Stencil Buffer
Textures Resolution up-to 2048x2048
Texture Compression DXT, FXT
Single-Pass Bilinear / Trilinear texture filtering
Anisotropic Filtering (16x max. ~ 128tap)
Single-Pass & Single Cycle Multi Texturing
Single-Pass & Single Cycle Bump Mapping
Alpha Blending
Pixel Shader 1.1
Line / Edge AntiAliasing
Full-Scene AntiAliasing: MultiSampling (4x per Rampage, 800 MSamples/s)
Full-Scene AntiAliasing: Rotated-Grid Super Sampling
Flat / Gourard Shading
LOD MipMapping
Sub-Pixel & Sub-Texel Correction
Programmable Fog Effects
T-Buffer (all effects from VSA-100)
M-Buffer (for Multi Sample-AntiAliasing)
HW supported HSR

SAGE:
25 HW lights
Vertex Shader

Options:

AGP-4
64MB DDR per chip
passive cooling do 200 MHz

API, rendering:

MS Direct 3D over 8.0 spec.
3Dfx Glide
SGI OpenGL

Also there are alpha drivers on which Rampage can run in 2D in W2k. Source code for them is also available but no one worked on them to run more 3D features.
A week before 3dfx went out of business there was Rampage successfully running Quake3 in lab on experimental OpenGL ICD. They had this card almost ready and this card would be on market as first card which support pixel shaders a year before GF3 launch!!! but is only IF....

I'd believe it!
I don't quite think it could do 25HW lights... but never the less...

Tell me about the Brazos.

[Vykupitel]

Originally Posted by TheWheelman

I'd believe it!
I don't quite think it could do 25HW lights... but never the less...

Tell me about the Brazos.

Yes, it could do 25HW lights,but with vertex unit called SAGE,Scalable Architecture Geometry Engine, geometric coprocessor, řadič, programmable T&L processor. It can create 50 million polygons per sec.

GeForce 256 - 15 million polygons per sec.
GeForce 2 - 25 million polygons per sec.
Radeon - 30 million polygons per sec.

[Vykupitel]

Originally Posted by Havokie

What were the power requirements, actually, if anyone knows? Which Voodoo card has the external power unit, or was that merely a planned unit that never made it? I can't remember...

So external unit Voodoo Volts had 100W. It is said that power requirements of V56k was around 50W.

[jiu-jitsuGOD]

Originally Posted by GhostXL

i dunno about that...thats cuz they had 3dfx Glide..which was much faster.... I had a voodoo5 5500 AGP 8x and the thing flew. It was much faster than my friends G2. I had that voodoo5 in a P3 1ghz at the time of its peak. I loved that machine...

Many good times with the original Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, Heretic 2, American McGees Alice (fun game, and still is) etc.

a voodoo 5 6000 would have got smoked bya geforce 3 hand down I owned a 5500 and it got pwnd by a geforce 2 ultra those line of cards WERE NOT THAT GOOD

[FlawleZ]

Originally Posted by jiu-jitsuGOD

a voodoo 5 6000 would have got smoked bya geforce 3 hand down I owned a 5500 and it got pwnd by a geforce 2 ultra those line of cards WERE NOT THAT GOOD

Well how did your 5500 fare in benchmarks? Would it run 3DMark 03? I've still got my GeForce 3 it would be interesting to compare them, too bad they never made the 6000.

Just noticed you live in SA too.

[scatman839]

I was wondering, since the wikipedia article didn't explain it too well.

Why did glide fail?

It seems odd for something like that to just, completely disappear.

[Gromuhl'Djun]

Glide didn't fail because it was bad, but because it was reserved for 3Dfx cards only. As there were cheaper, faster, less power requiring cards on the market than the 3Dfx cards (and lots of other mistakes the company made)
In the end 3Dfx was bought by Nvidia and glide disappeared (and games supported OpenGL and Direct3D anyway by then, so glide became obsolete)

[F1refly]

if glide was around today, it would face tough competition from dx10
is opengl ever been upgraded from 2.0? what does it offer over dx9 and 10?
3dfx was cool back in its day, but not sure whats the relevance now