Just for curiosity, are these GPU chips you bought original surplus ones, or does some Chinese company manufacture new chips for hobbyists?

junglemontana wrote:

Just for curiosity, are these GPU chips you bought original surplus ones, or does some Chinese company manufacture new chips for hobbyists?

Original surplus for sure. More than likely after the shutdown of 3DFX manufacturing plants all unused proprietary ICs were sent to be scrapped as e-waste and someone saved them before the crusher.

How many years til we have the tech to make replica ICs ..

It isn't very complicated to design a Glide compatible GPU. It's a problem to sell it because all 3Dfx intellectual property belongs to NVIDIA. No one wants to be sued hard.

OTOH it's possible to manufacture clone PCBs for the V5 5500 or 6000 and use those surplus chips to produce replicas.

Kizmo wrote:

junglemontana wrote:

Just for curiosity, are these GPU chips you bought original surplus ones, or does some Chinese company manufacture new chips for hobbyists?

Original surplus for sure. More than likely after the shutdown of 3DFX manufacturing plants all unused proprietary ICs were sent to be scrapped as e-waste and someone saved them before the crusher.

When 3Dfx went bankrupt, it was very likely their remaining assets were auctioned off to pay the creditors.

ph4nt0m wrote:

It isn't very complicated to design a Glide compatible GPU. It's a problem to sell it because all 3Dfx intellectual property belongs to NVIDIA. No one wants to be sued hard.

Somehow I imagine flying under the radar is easier than recreating the chip itself

Does a V1 Chip fit inside a FPGA ? ;D

matze79 wrote:

Does a V1 Chip fit inside a FPGA ? ;D

Voodoo Graphics is 3 chips: FBI, TREX and DAC. Banshee was the 1st single chip design, ~4 million transistors. V3 is ~7 million. VSA-100 is ~14 million. Neither is a problem for modern high end FPGAs.

Just in case anyone is interested, there is a us ebay seller that is selling the vsa chips for around $22 usd shipped, and they claim to have around 270 available.

tannerstevo wrote:

Just in case anyone is interested, there is a us ebay seller that is selling the vsa chips for around $22 usd shipped, and they claim to have around 270 available.

I saw his ad. Rev. 220 chips unfortunately. Rev. 320 are more worthy to buy. I'm looking for Voodoo 3 chips because I have a number of cards pulled from arcade machines with dead chips due to overheating.