A never-released prototype of the 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000 GPU was recently sold on eBay for $15,000. The sale has drawn attention in the gaming community as the Voodoo 5 6000 was planned to be the flagship of the Voodoo 5 GPU family but never made it to retail.
VSA-100 Architecture
The Voodoo 5 6000 is based on the VSA-100 architecture and features a total of four VSA-100 chips each with 32 MB of RAM. The card was a promising rival to contemporary GeForce 2 and Radeon 7000 series GPUs but due to its complexity and cost, it was never produced.
The prototype was made at a later stage of the project where most of the bugs were ironed out. The prototype fixes early data corruption bugs that limited it to AGP 2x speeds. The retail version of the card would have required an external power supply as it required more power than the AGP graphics slot could provide.
Acquired by Nvidia
Nvidia acquired 3dfx at the end of 2000 before the Voodoo 5 6000 or anything similar could make it to market. The sale of the prototype harkens back to a time when Nvidia, ATI, and AMD were the only major players in the dedicated graphics market before Intel finally released its first dedicated Arc GPUs in 2022.
