NVidia revives the Voodoo line

[rubix_1011]

nVidia announces the revival of the Voodoo line of 3DFX cards. For those of you not familiar, nVidia bought out 3DFX just prior to the major push for the GeForce line/moniker of cards. This obviously appears to be a brand similar to the Dell/Alienware juncture; Geforce cards may remain the mainstream cards, Voodoo looks to capture the high-end, performance segment:

Geforce/Voodoo unveiling

There will be waterblocks ready at release:

The Voodoo 590 is indeed the most remarkable graphics card we have ever seen. While the most powerful graphics cards today use at most two GPUs on a single board, the Voodoo 590 uses a mind boggling two hundred and thirty-three VSA-100 chips.

Sticking to this purist expression Voodoo technology, the VSA-100 chip has not been altered in any way. Like the original chip, it's still clocked at 166 MHz. It has two pixel pipelines. It performs 3dfx' patented single-pass, single-cycle multitexturing. It features the much lauded T-buffer cinematic technology. And of course, it supports Glide.

"This is a one of a kind product. It's got 233 chips. It's got over 7 gigs of memory. The competition has nothing like it," says Brian Burke, former Public Relations Manager at 3dfx, now at NVIDIA.

But the Voodoo 590 is not entirely an ex-3dfx project. According to Tamasi, a few of the NVIDIA founders chipped in on the design. “To cool 233 chips, we borrowed heavily from the fan design for NV30. And scaled it accordingly too of course," he said with a wink

"In the meantime, if you really need this level of performance, you could always get the GeForce GTX 590," says Burke. "It's not as cool as the Voodoo 590, but hey, it's uses a lot of Voodoo tech in its core."

 

[wolfram23]

lol. That's funny. I don't know what half those things are (Glide, VSA-100, T-buffer cinematic technology) but yeah, good stuff.

 

[d0gr0ck]

All those chips, where will the fit the voltage regulation circuitry!? (oh wait... 😛)

 

[ambam]

April fools?

 

[rubix_1011]

Yeah- I found this on a link to the nVidia/Geforce page/forums. It's an April Fool's joke.

If you read through the actual article on the page, it's pretty apparent it's a joke...they discuss how the new Voodoo card isn't new tech, they simply were going to utilize 100's of the old chips to make parallel GPU card that would be the equivalent to the newly released 590 cards...it was a sales/release tactic.

In the meantime, if you really need this level of performance, you could always get the GeForce GTX 590