Image: eBay person “gtastuntcrew302”
If you suppose 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. While the Voodoo sequence of GPUs can just about deal with a contemporary model of Tetris (for those who go away ray tracing off), they had been beloved again within the 90s…a lot so that somebody just spent an enormous chunk of money just to personal one of many final 3DFX prototype playing cards.
The Voodoo 5 6000 was 3DFX’s last GPU design earlier than the corporate was sold to Nvidia. According to Wikipedia, there have been just a little 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 card with the working quantity 3700, a near-final revision, popped up on eBay a few weeks in the past. It was sold out of Washington state and noticed by KitGuru. The vendor claims to be a collector who may “personally verify” that the card runs in suitable {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 private pc historical past. Shipping was free.
The Voodoo 5 6000 linked to motherboards utilizing the now-extinct Advanced Graphics Port, packing a whopping 128 megabytes of reminiscence and a GPU clock of 166MHz. It would have been the primary GPU to mix 4 processors and reminiscence banks to hit these numbers. Its large promoting level was to be the flexibility 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 card by way of a Molex plug.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer
Michael is a former graphic designer who’s been constructing and tweaking desktop computer systems for longer than he cares to confess. His pursuits embrace people music, soccer, science fiction, and salsa verde, in no explicit order.
…. to be continued
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