Voodoo 5 was announced fairly early showing its AA tech, but by the time it came out it was obsolete, a couple of months was a lot in"early" gpu days.
Everything was moving fast, 6 months was the difference between bleeding edge and an obsolete piece of shit pc 😜

3dfx had a place in some gamers hearths because voodoo 2 (sli) was the pinnacle of 3d, just 2y prior to voodoo 5.
But as far as I remember, when v5 launched, uu nice box, that's about it.

Voodoo 5 was announced fairly early

Voodoo 5 was already obsolete during the announcement.

Re: Reverse-Engineering the 3DFX VSA-100 Chipset

Performance-wise yes, but no one knew that, and radeon and gf2 werent released yet, when v5 was expected.
Tech looked good, remember reading in Pc Gamer about aa and was thinking, wow games really do have jagged edges.

At the time, atleast for me, 3d prophet II cards and their blue was what voodoo 2 was before, something that would be nice to have 😁

Anti-aliasing wasn't something new. In fact, even cards like Riva 128ZX and Voodoo 2 were capable of that. 3dfx were promoting brand new T-Buffer as pioneer of "cinematic" effects in games, but that was quite shallow marketing.

Performance-wise yes, but no one knew that

It was also obsolete feature wise.

matze79 wrote on 2021-06-14, 09:39:

The Only Reason to own a V5 is the L33t Factor or if one wants play Glide Games on High Resolution. Its a Card born out of Despa […]
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The Only Reason to own a V5 is the L33t Factor or if one wants play Glide Games on High Resolution.
Its a Card born out of Despair.
Not having a fast enough Graphics Chip .. and overcoming this by using multiple of it on one Card.

If it would released in 1999 it would really a great Card.. but.. yeah you know it came too late.

I bought a V5-5500 new shortly after it was released. Still have that card and also bought a spare a couple years ago just in case.

I loved being able to play Glide games on high resolution. I had a V3-3500 before I bought the V5-5500.

I had a chance to buy a Voodoo 5 PCI for a "decent" price, by the going rates on ebay, and I passed it up. If I had one already I would certainly mess around with it, but as a practical purchase I don't see it. The only game I know of that for sure looks better in glide mode is unreal gold. There are fan patches for that game that fix all of that and make it a breeze to run on any version of windows you like. The ability to add AA to games that only run at 640x480 or some other lower resolution is nice, but you can do so much more with nglide that I kind of don't see the point. Glide support for DOS games is more important to me, which rules out all of the later voodoo cards anyway. I went with voodoo 2 sli instead, which was not at all cheap, but just as neat and significantly more compatible.

Cool, yes definitely. Practical in anyway? I don't think so.

It's the only hardware that I bought back then and still have the original box and everything that was in it... But yes, the others are right about it being not really worth owning now

Dominus wrote on 2021-06-14, 20:31:

It's the only hardware that I bought back then and still have the original box and everything that was in it... But yes, the others are right about it being not really worth owning now

What were your reasons for buying it at the time?

I was a 3dfx fanboy probably 😀
Seriously the big reason was that I am a big Ultima fan and at the time glide was the only thing reasonable to play Ultima 9 on. These days not so much but back then yes it was. Was it worth it, probably not 😀
But for me it was a logical thing to do. I had bought a V2 a little bit after it came out, was satisified with it and it was good enough for me until the V5 came out.

Dominus wrote on 2021-06-14, 20:47:

I was a 3dfx fanboy probably 😀
Seriously the big reason was that I am a big Ultima fan and at the time glide was the only thing reasonable to play Ultima 9 on. These days not so much but back then yes it was. Was it worth it, probably not 😀
But for me it was a logical thing to do. I had bought a V2 a little bit after it came out, was satisified with it and it was good enough for me until the V5 came out.

That is an important point to make. How essential glide feels is very different today, after two decades of community maintenance, then it was at the time. Ultimately it depends on what essential essence you are trying to capture. Playing the games in anyway no matter how often means you don't have to buy any retro hardware at all. That's no fun.

Don't know about the V4, it would have been fairly weak by the time it was released. Even the V5 was not strong but it sort of held it's ground especially on Glide titles. As retro cards? Well they are expensive as heck, about as fast as a $5 GF4MX440, for for the pragmatist no, they are not worth it, but for the nostalgia hound who wants authenticity and the best Glide accelerator you can (reasonably) find....well I am not sure they are "worth it" even then but many of us still take the plunge. I don't regret it, and I really enjoy gaming on the V5 every chance I can. Find those games with the Glide option is a fun game in itself. Last game I played on it was Homeworld. Paired with a Vortex2 it's just a perfect time capsule of y2k gaming goodness.

I totally agree with Kolderman.
The voodoo 5 5500 even plays gta 3 and gta vice city at a grand level. The latter better then the first.
On the latesr glide games it shines like a star, but you have to go for the complete late 3dfx experience to even want to use one.
I honoustly would never pay 300$+ ish for this card now. I was one of the lucky ones to obtain my little pearl on a radio market for about 2$ because it has 2 fans while laying on a 1$ a card table. This makes it even more special for me, never expecting it to actually even work. This was 12 years ago now.

If I found a V4 for cheap I would get it as it makes sense as a V3 with AA for Slot-1 and early Socket370 aystems but even as a 3dfx fan I feel V5 makes sense in no buşld I can think of except maybe a turn of the millennium troll build..

If we say nowdays as most rare and collector items that has some "history" it is nice to collect V4 or V5 cards. But if we talk back in their past, thinking again at that time it was probably not the best option to choose those cards beside the well known brand that already felt like had lost the last two trains of opportunities to come back (both the Avenger and VSA chips felt like taking time for "unknown" future next generation solutions and later we all knew which solutions were going theorically to be developed but still with some sort of complex logic and not the more common single-chip solution like anyone else were building) at that point when the V5 6K was already clear that it'd most probably never be released, any other competitor cards had more features (more or less needed) and sometimes better prices. Let's look at the V4 4500 vs GF2 MX comparison at which price and at which time..
Nowdays everything seems to have value just cause are old hardware and with such known brand I understand it. But as discussed already in older threads like other brands they didn't make many correct choices in a time where to survive in the market the correct choices had to be taken in very short time.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2021-06-14, 15:39:

Anti-aliasing wasn't something new. In fact, even cards like Riva 128ZX and Voodoo 2 were capable of that. 3dfx were promoting brand new T-Buffer as pioneer of "cinematic" effects in games, but that was quite shallow marketing.

Performance-wise yes, but no one knew that

It was also obsolete feature wise.

I agree on these opinions. The anti-aliasing thing was surely a great (probably the only one with the right marketing) reason to have some interest in the V5 but still it was a feature already somehow known in previous cards, obviously not much used before in the FSAA logic but I think to remember some discussione where the Edge Antialiasing already showed "miracles" in games like Tomb Raider on older cards.
But it wasn't enough imho. I do remember reading tech newspaper with much passion in those times about the preview (still to be released..) of the VSA-100 line and I still remember feeling like "...ok the T-Buffer but if sw developer must specifically code just for that I don't know how much useful it might be...than the 32bit, the high res textures, the Motion Compensation... the SLI on a single PCB... all features already "expected" but yet discussed as next gen?".. after basically most reviews of the previous V3 underlined the known missing features (even if mantaining the promised frame rates), I was expecting more something like a Geforce/Radeon solution.

in 2000 there were better options than the v5 and v4, i didnt make sense to buy one, it was overpowered to run any glide game (voodoo 3 was more than enough) and underpowered to run almost any DX7 game

from a retro stand point i think the voodoo 3 is the best all around voodoo card.

I *think* there might be a lot of hindsight involved or some people being better informed at the time. Me and others were certainly excited about the V5 but I have to confess I wasn't very up to speed at the time and the market seemed to change a lot back then which didn't exactly make me looking forward to informing me more in depth. Probably a mistake 😀 but then I didn't regret it...

It was interesting coming into the market around 2000 after several years break. As a buyer at the time, it was like being swept along in an inevitable tide towards the nvidia range. I recall next-to-zero incentive to buy 3dfx, they were irrelevant. In hindsight, the marketing push from nvidia - to take and keep the space - was huge, and they had the hardware capabilities and definitely the prices to do it. TNT2 cards could already be had for relative peanuts, and Geforce 2-whatevers were spreading unchecked through every tier.

In those times I switched from the Voodoo3 2000 card I later sold to a Geforce2 MX card and later the Kyro2 64MB. The Voodoo3 was fast obviously but if the Voodoo3 was needed to "take time" I'd have understood that (even if much less the choice to call it Voodoo 3 as already said.. the third generation of such big brand name had to be on the marketing side a next gen gpu imho and once it could not the very same brand suffered and the VSA didn't solve that going to "Voodoo 4" and "Voodoo 5"...) so one skipped generation was understandable, another one not. ATi was really running with faster and features full chips even if maybe not the fastest, but they had a great "improvement curve".. every chips became better. The Rage 128 Pro was a very good chip, the Radeon was the answer needed to survive in such complex time even if I might remember a bit late (?) but still was a fast, full of features, quite very big chip and with the Radeon SDR that imho was a great low end offer. Things got even better later with the R200 and the R300. If we think to how much experience they had into graphic cards since early 90's or before they really went as far as few could.

"...ok the T-Buffer but if sw developer must specifically code just for that I don't know how much useful it might be...

I think all T-Buffer features they've showed can be done on competitive fixed function hardware, at least with FSAA support. Original SIlent Hill 2 release had depth of field effects with DX7 video cards. Not that it really mattered with Voodoo 5 fillrate and memory bandwidth.