Graphics cards cost more than they used to, but it turns out that they can get even more expensive when they’re also a rare collector’s item. A late-revision prototype of the unreleased Voodoo 5 6000—intended as the flagship of the Voodoo 5 GPU family—sold on eBay this week for $15,000, a price that makes the GeForce RTX 4090 look cheap by comparison.

The GPU was said to be in “excellent condition” and appears to be fully functional—seller gtastuntcrew302 posted a screenshot of the card achieving a score of 6,995 in 3DMark 2000 run at a 1024×768 resolution. These cards were never sold at retail, and only about 1,000 prototypes were manufactured, according to Piotr Gontarczyk’s Polish-language history of 3dfx.

“This card was personally reworked by the well known 3DFX engineer Hank Semenec for fully stable 8X FSAA (I have personally verified that this card is rock solid at 8X),” wrote the seller. “Unlike a lot of other Voodoo 5 6000 prototypes, this one is from the later stages of the 6K prototype project where the vast majority of bugs have been ironed out.”

Based on the same VSA-100 architecture as the single-GPU Voodoo 4 4500 and the dual-GPU Voodoo 5 5500, the 6000 includes a total of four VSA-100 chips with access to 32MB of RAM apiece. It might have been able to beat contemporary GeForce 2 and Radeon 7000-series GPUs, but those GPUs each used a single chip, making them much easier to manufacture and cheaper to buy. VSA-100 also lacked full support for the Direct3D 7 and Direct3D 8 graphics APIs, both of which were supported by Nvidia and ATI GPUs at the time.

Early prototypes also had data corruption bugs that limited them to AGP 2x speeds, though the prototype from this eBay listing appears to have resolved those bugs. The retail version of the card would have required an external power brick because it needed more power than the AGP graphics slot could provide—a rarity at the time, though today’s GPUs virtually all require extra power via some internal connector. The prototype draws its extra power from an internal 4-pin Molex connector, which was commonly used for hard drives, optical drives, and other internal accessories at the time.

Nvidia bought 3dfx in late 2000, before the Voodoo 5 6000 or anything like it could come to market. Nvidia and ATI (and then, AMD, after AMD bought ATI) were the only major players in the dedicated graphics market for more than two decades until Intel finally launched its first Arc dedicated GPUs in 2022.

Listing image by gtastuntcrew302/eBay

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1917663