This 23 Year Old Prototype Video Card has FOUR GPUs… AND IT WORKS!

[Emily Young]

3dfx was the king of the graphics card world in the 90s, and in a flash they were gone. The Voodoo 5 6000 was the last GPU 3dfx produced, and released – Could it have changed the face of PC gaming?

 

 

[da na]

Some people know about the Voodoo card and Evans & Sutherland SimFusion... but there are even more odd 4 GPU cards. 
That one weird ATI Rage with 4 GPUs

CAE Tropos

 

Would love to see those covered next, although those are even rarer, and I doubt there are even any existing cards of the latter.

[Stugots]

I was in the TNT2 camp back then with my Viper V770 Ultra. 

 

Anyone else remember the ATI Rage Fury Maxx?  I had a friend that dumped a fortune into one of those and it was only kinda/sorta good Windows 98. 

[CerealExperimentsLain]

7 hours ago, Stugots said:

Anyone else remember the ATI Rage Fury Maxx?  I had a friend that dumped a fortune into one of those and it was only kinda/sorta good Windows 98. 

 

The Rage Fury Maxx used a trick where it's actually two discrete Rage 128 Pros on one card, one is on the AGP bus and the other is communicating through PCI through that same AGP bus.  This actually worked in Windows 9X.  ...It did not work in anything Windows NT derived like Win2K, WinXP or anything after those.  So on those OS's it could only work as a single card... In that scenario, it then became a single Rage 128 Pro.  A very expensive Rage 128 Pro.

[KEIN NEIN]

Thanks. Sadly, I can't afford quad GPU setups :(

[mini-z1994]

Too show an fps counter in half-life you can use cl_showfps 1 & fps_max 999 too increase the fps cap as id imagine it might be limited too 101 in normal gameplay.
Another good showcase for the voodoo 5 6000 would be unreal, quake 2 & quake 3 if you happen too still have the card around to play around with a bit.
 

[Xalem]

My apologies if this is too off topic, but hey! This is my PC case !
 

This is only running parts from 2009: i5 750 @2.67, ATI Radeon 5770, 8GB of quad changed ram.

[Nystemy]

Competition is indeed a good thing in this regard.

3dfx did get a bit lost on their way and making a bit rash business decisions it seems.

 

However, all companies have debt, it all technically belongs to the shareholders. 3dfx simply didn't deliver enough shareholder value compared to the value of their assets. Assets that were likely to shrink given the writing on the wall at the time, so that the shareholders liquidated the company when it were heading to the grave isn't too surprising.

 

Now, technically the same can happen to any company.

Though, I suspect that our current GPU vendors are rather far away from painting themselves into as bad of a corner as 3dfx managed to do.

[Retro_R]

i'm this is an unoffical one, but just the thumbnail alone is insane.

[Zodiark1593]

The Voodoo cards were largely just really fast rasterizers. Really good at that specific component of graphics rendering, but not especially flexible. Hardware T&L was a game changer that allowed competitors to surpass 3dfx, and by the time proper shaders came, 3dfx was no longer a factor.
 

Interestingly, a more modern variant of this older style of rendering can be seen in the Playstation 2’s Graphics Synthesizer. It lacks shaders, and hardware T&L (the Emotion Engine handled polygons via vector units), but packed in a whopping 16 pixel pipelines at ~150 MHz (2.4 Gpixels/s), connected to a slice of 4MB EDRAM that provides 48 GB/s of bandwidth.
 

While also not flexible, the massively overkill fill rate for 640x480 meant overdraw was not a bottleneck, at all. Effects were accomplished by extensive layering, and used multiple render passes to accomplish multi-texturing (another feature taken for granted), something no sane dev would try on modern hardware. Draw heavy effects that would choke out the original Xbox hardware (smoke, grass, foliage, etc), the PS2 can easily eat up. 

[Spindel]

I've said it before but I love when you do videos with/about older stuff. 

 

It's probably something to be learned when talking about now defunct companies that once were a force to be reckoned with. 

 

Now I want a video about Matrox Parhelia! (and some history about Matrox when they still made stuff that mattered) 

[Fl0ppa]

Hi, does anyone know the name of the synthwave song that plays in the background of the intro section?

[leathco]

EDIT:  I'm an idiot and misremembering what an AGP card looks like