This 23 Year Old Prototype Video Card has FOUR GPUs… AND IT WORKS! 3dfx Vodooo 5 6000

This 23 Year Old Prototype Video Card has FOUR GPUs… AND IT WORKS! 3dfx Vodooo 5 6000

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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?

Discuss on the forum: https://linustechtips.com/topic/1505531-this-23-year-old-prototype-video-card-has-four-gpus%E2%80%A6-and-it-works/

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MUSIC CREDIT
—————————————————
Intro: Laszlo – Supernova
Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKfxmFU3lWY
iTunes Download Link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/supernova/id936805712
Artist Link: https://soundcloud.com/laszlomusic

Outro: Approaching Nirvana – Sugar High
Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngsGBSCDwcI
Listen on Spotify: http://spoti.fi/UxWkUw
Artist Link: http://www.youtube.com/approachingnirvana

Intro animation by MBarek Abdelwassaa https://www.instagram.com/mbarek_abdel/
Monitor And Keyboard by vadimmihalkevich / CC BY 4.0  https://geni.us/PgGWp
Mechanical RGB Keyboard by BigBrotherECE / CC BY 4.0 https://geni.us/mj6pHk4
Mouse Gamer free Model By Oscar Creativo / CC BY 4.0 https://geni.us/Ps3XfE

CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro
1:17 What makes this so special?
2:13 Firing it up and Half-Life 1
4:40 Tribes 2
5:58 3DMark 2001
7:22 The prototype isn’t the only way to play
8:04 It was doomed to failure
9:03 Why was 3dfx even successful?
11:52 3dfx got complacent
13:29 Forced to compete without a competitive product
14:11 The doors close and Nvidia takes over
14:52 Conclusion – Competition is good

49 Comments

  1. cacodayum on May 9, 2023 at 8:15 am

    It genuinely bothers me that I seem to know more about this excessively rare card than the fancypants PC enthusiasts here.
    I feel like the Athlon XP might actually be a bottleneck there. That card was almost strong enough to handle a modded Doom 3.
    Half-Life? Really? At 1024×768, not… like… 2048×1536? Not Quake III Arena, not RtCW, not UT’99 or even UT2003. Fellas… after the Voodoo3, Glide was not even their focus anymore. Cool to see it working at least & owned by a collector.



  2. Master Zoentrobe's Gaming Clips on May 9, 2023 at 8:16 am

    I think that I still have that exact PC case… Somewhere. Probably packed up in a box.
    Huh. I also had a Riva TNT 2. I remember it being much more affordable for it’s performance vs. the Voodoo 3.



  3. JustSomeLayman on May 9, 2023 at 8:17 am

    Wow, a $600 GPU? That’s unheard of!



  4. bogdansss on May 9, 2023 at 8:18 am

    My god, that butter smooth experience in Half Life 1! I remember finishing the game when it came out at what I think was an average of 10 fps :))



  5. LiK on May 9, 2023 at 8:19 am

    That belongs in a museum!



  6. Wayne Cook on May 9, 2023 at 8:19 am

    OMG TRIBES!



  7. Sevo on May 9, 2023 at 8:20 am

    Ah yes better title, different thumbnail too?



  8. XaunVader on May 9, 2023 at 8:22 am

    My first GPU was a Voodoo3 3000 AGP I bought at Best Buy around May 1999.



  9. Christopher on May 9, 2023 at 8:22 am

    OMG, make a new video. I’ve been ignoring this video fpr 2 days.



  10. Keller Baller on May 9, 2023 at 8:22 am

    Good job! I appreciate you mentioning the russian modder, even though the Russian government consists of trash you didn’t blackball an innocent modder and still mentioned him, shoutouts



  11. SpacebarWASD on May 9, 2023 at 8:23 am

    TNT2 my first video card and I missed Glide lolll



  12. Das Rheinsgold on May 9, 2023 at 8:26 am

    You might ask yourself why doesn’t your old flagship phone run nearly as well as this even though it’s got newer hardware and software. Good question indeed.



  13. curtisngl on May 9, 2023 at 8:27 am

    3:18 Linus is channeling his South Park Canadian 😂



  14. Al13n1nV8D3R on May 9, 2023 at 8:27 am

    I love 3DFX and their funny commercials! My first 3dfx card was the Voodoo 2 in SLI. I remember how much better the graphics looked with the Glide API. Doom 2 with glide was like playing a new game! And i was fragging with Godlike and Massacre on a regular basis in Unreal Tournament. Mechwarrior 2 look amazing too.

    My last 3DFX card was the Voodoo 3 3500 TV AGP. Thats was good but not as much a game changer as Voodoo 2 was.



  15. Hokou on May 9, 2023 at 8:27 am

    a woodo would?



  16. turboimport95 on May 9, 2023 at 8:29 am

    imagine a card like this with 4 4090 Gpus slapped on there it would be a monstrous beast..



  17. Savantskie on May 9, 2023 at 8:29 am

    The fact that you brough this up was awesome. I NEVER knew why 3dfx folded. I knew they did, but there were so many rumors at the time, I didn’t know who to believe. Thank you for this video. Maybe do another video about ATI?



  18. Richard Frostell on May 9, 2023 at 8:32 am

    What!? That’s the same computer case I had back in the day!



  19. Jonathan Roth on May 9, 2023 at 8:33 am

    One other nifty trick with the early Voodoo cards, because they only accelerated 3d, they were platform agnostic. You didn’t have to flash the bios to use the same card on a Mac to recognize the color space. A co-worker had a pair of Voodoo 2 cards running in SLI which he replaced with a Voodoo 3, so I managed to get one of them for cheap. Installing it in my G3 desktop was as easy as popping in the card, and dragging the driver into the system folder.



  20. puttitat2 on May 9, 2023 at 8:35 am

    3:18 Best unintentional Terrance and Philip impression ever.



  21. Dark Knife on May 9, 2023 at 8:35 am

    I still got an TNT2 at home



  22. Matias on May 9, 2023 at 8:35 am

    Hi Linus, you remember de card AGEIA ?? Y have 2 of this cards in my stuff, it aplies tambien al contexto de tu video. Do you want one of this cards tro make a video ??



  23. Jonathan Wilson on May 9, 2023 at 8:36 am

    Tribes was such an awesome game.



  24. Spaceman Outerspace on May 9, 2023 at 8:36 am

    I still have my voodoo 2 card. Want to buy it from me?



  25. 超级商场 on May 9, 2023 at 8:37 am

    I am a proud TNT2 16mb owner. 👏



  26. PeTe DoubleUDe on May 9, 2023 at 8:37 am

    Thats my old PC tower! Give it back to me! 🥰



  27. Sjoer van der Ploeg on May 9, 2023 at 8:38 am

    You are confused with Max Payne… which was also "inspired by" 😉



  28. Mark Randall on May 9, 2023 at 8:40 am

    soyboy face will always make me laugh



  29. Wayne Cook on May 9, 2023 at 8:45 am

    What about the purple bronze armor Everquest glitch from voodoo drivers?



  30. 4N5W3R5 on May 9, 2023 at 8:46 am

    2:46 How many of you caught the Theme song from MacGyver playing in the background? <3 youtube.com/watch?v=UKTNWI0eYJ4



  31. Dante Coal on May 9, 2023 at 8:49 am

    Didn’t… Didn’t Gamers Nexus do this already? Oh yeah, a month ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aMiEszQBik



  32. Landscapes and Motion on May 9, 2023 at 8:51 am

    Quake 2 multiplayer mods (Action Quake 2) with voodoo and 56k modem.



  33. dojomojomofo on May 9, 2023 at 8:51 am

    I had a Voodoo 3 3500 and it was a nice card for the time, but definitely a mixed bag. The graphical quality was the best in games that supported it well – Unreal Tournament for instance, you could run right up to a wall and admire fine grained textures on things. It ran very smoothly too… but was highly unstable if you did anything but play the game. Games had to run in fullscreen mode and if you alt-tabbed an accelerated game, you were headed for a crash. Many titles needed a special MiniGL driver. The video capture was choppy and low quality garbage – I bought a Hauppauge card to handle it eventually that outclassed it every way for capture.



  34. RetroRolf on May 9, 2023 at 8:52 am

    Thats Crazy! I had only the Vodooo 5 5500 AGP whit Box



  35. Alex F on May 9, 2023 at 8:52 am

    Pity he didn’t mentioned the work Oskhar has been doing in Spain by fixing many cards for years. Also, replacing chips with improved versions …many thanks for doing this video. I loved it.



  36. BGQ585 on May 9, 2023 at 8:54 am

    Never had 3dfx card… only had matrox mystique, Riva tnt2, geforce2 ultra and Radeon 9700pro was the final.

    The great ‘graphic cards war’ period. People are just into it building up their gaming pcs. Crazy times.



  37. Brian Buchholtz on May 9, 2023 at 8:58 am

    Awesome video! You should be getting a higher 3DMark 2001 score. With my LGA1366-based system, I’m getting a score of 5450 (no overclocking), with Anthony’s PCI-based Voodoo5 6000. Also, do you have any interest in selling one of your Intel BlackOps 4.6GHz CPUs? I’d like to try testing that CPU with my LGA2011 system I’m working on. I want to see how fast I make make the Voodoo5 6000 go!



  38. SujiMayne on May 9, 2023 at 8:59 am

    It’s 2023 and Linus still doesn’t understand how pointless and disingenuous it is to compare prices between decades, without adjusting for inflation.



  39. Chester Gregg on May 9, 2023 at 9:01 am

    Shazbot!



  40. Jordan Ranstead on May 9, 2023 at 9:02 am

    You gotta test that bad boy on bungholiomarks



  41. Lee Lky on May 9, 2023 at 9:04 am

    Maybe can try a better Mainboard and CPU. Seems like bottleneck the card. It can do much better😅



  42. Wannabe Wise on May 9, 2023 at 9:05 am

    russians go to hell tho



  43. MCInferno on May 9, 2023 at 9:05 am

    E



  44. jpvalverde85 on May 9, 2023 at 9:06 am

    Few people cares, but it was not shaders what Voodoo’s lacked, was a hardware transform and lightning engine, that was a fixed function hardware to deal with geometry and light handling faster than a cpu could (Voodoos can do software t&l boosted by simd isa like sse or 3dnow!). What Voodoos had better than other cards was a tight and performant feature set, among those features a poligon setup engine that offloaded some work from the cpu and that was on big reason to require a less powerful cpu when using Voodoos. The Voodoos ill fated succesor, the Rampage chip (Spectre the name of the cards series) reached Alpha phase with semi working silicon (very few samples, far less than Voodoo 5 6000s) and as platform had one AGP+T&L chip and could have more than one raster chip with very early programmable shader features, but never came to proper light.



  45. Default 69 on May 9, 2023 at 9:07 am

    Pls make a video in bad antialaising on 1080p in all games no antialaising setting works like msaa smaa fxaa not even taa works properly



  46. Hebu The Lone Wolf on May 9, 2023 at 9:08 am

    8:46 "Which begs the question, who on earth would spend that much money on a graphics card?" meanwhile 2023 high end cars cost 1400-2000$ T_T



  47. Dreamslacker on May 9, 2023 at 9:10 am

    This brings back so many memories.. I remember wanting a Voodoo but my dad refused to get one.
    We ended up with a Matrox M3D instead, paired with the Matrox Millenium on our Pentium Pro 200Mhz setup because he got nice discounts from work (he worked in urban/ city planning government agency that had very good deals on business graphics solutions like Matrox/ SGI/ Quantum3D).



  48. Chris Graff on May 9, 2023 at 9:10 am

    I had a handful of 3dfx cards back in the day. I was a total 3dfx fan and even owned a vodoo 5 5500. I was soo mad at nvidia for killing them that I did not buy an nvidia based card for a decade.



  49. reskin33 on May 9, 2023 at 9:14 am

    talk about blast from the past… this video was pure dopamine nostalgia IV drip