Anthony, a hardware modder and graphics accelerator historian, created a clone of the Voodoo 5 6000. This quad GPU card was never released to the public and we are forever left wondering what happened to it.

Anthony posted details of his nifty reverse engineering effort on Mod Labs (via HotHardware), noting that the cloned card still did not have an official name. However, it shares the same hardware specifications as the Voodoo 5 6000, including four VSA-100 graphics chips running at 166 MHz and the usual PCI (not PCI Express) interface.

It also has 128 MB of video memory, also running at 166 MHz (although the 5ns memory chip can run at 200 MHz).

Remarkably, this is a working card with the same BIOS and driver support as the original prototype; Anthony also claims that this clone card does not suffer from the same full-screen anti-aliasing problems as the original card.

For those unfamiliar with 3dfx, the company is a pioneer in 3D graphics acceleration for the PC. The first graphics card I ever bought was a Voodoo 3 2000, which I stuck in a Compaq with a Pentium MMX 200 MHz processor. Those were good times.

Nvidia began the process of acquiring 3dfx in late 2000, and a few years later the company became a footnote in computer graphics history. At that time, 3dfx produced a prototype of the Voodoo 5 6000.

Technically, the VSA-100 is a graphics co-processor; Nvidia likes to claim that it released the first true GPU (graphics processing unit) with the GeForce 256. graphics with four VSA-100 chips. cards is an impressive feat, even if it was never released to the public.

It is also, of course, tame by today's standards.

Each VSA-100 in the Voodoo 5 6000 was built on a 250nm manufacturing process, with a die size of 112mm2 and approximately 14 million transistors. To put this in perspective, Nvidia's latest generation GA102 Ampere GPU in the GeForce RTX 3090 has a die size of 628.4 mm2 and contains 28 billion transistors.

According to Anthony, this clone card is part of the first batch, with a second batch, possibly upgraded to AGP or PCI Express, planned. There will also be boxes for these cards, suggesting that Anthony may sell these to interested parties.