Voodoo 5

The Voodoo5 5500 was the last, most powerful graphics card 3dfx ever released. It sported two VSA-100 chips (VooDoo Scalable Architecture), each running at 166 MHz. It sported 64 MB SDRAM also running at 166 MHz. However, each processor had 32 MB VRAM dedicated to it, so it was really not a 64 MB card. These clockspeeds were problematic: 166 Mhz, coupled with a dual-pipeline card, simply wasn't enough, not even with two GPUs powering it. The reason for the low clockspeed was the 0.25µ (0.25 micrometer, or 250 nanometer) process upon which it was built. Despite 3dfx's claim that it was an "enhanced 0.25µ process", it was all too apparent that it wasn't fast enough. To make matter worse, the Voodoo5 5500 was not equipped with a T&L Unit (Transform and Lighting), which its competitors possessed, and so its full potential was reached only on very fast machines, since the T&L work had to be done by the CPU. The main focus which 3dfx touted, was the Full Screen Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) capability. It could run 2x or 4x FSAA, but in truth, at 4x FSAA, framerates in most games were so low they were unplayable. And while it boasted a decent fillrate (667 MTexels/s) it could never reach that, due to the tiny memory bandwidth (2.7 GB/s per processor).

Worst of all, it was late to market. This is perhaps what was most detrimental to 3dfx, despite all the other problems it was having. The Voodoo5 5500 came in three flavors: 4x AGP, PCI, and the Mac Edition, which was only PCI, though could run in 66 MHz PCI slots. While it came with overclocking software, the highest most people could hit was 175 MHz... a paltry 9MHz more than stock. Even with serious work, and good cooling, 183 MHz was only barely obtainable.

Voodoo5 could have had a brighter future, had it had a smaller process allowing for higher clocks, DDR SDRAM, and a T&L unit. The Voodoo5 5500's big brother, the Voodoo5 6000, which was a 128 MB card with four VSA-100s running at 166 Mhz, never made it to market. The successor to the Voodoo5 series, codenamed "Rampage", was already planned. It was supposed to have a smaller process, support for DDR-RAM, at least 200 MHz core, and a T&L unit. However, it had barely taped out and only one working copy was made before 3dfx was bought by nVidia.