DOS Days

3Dfx Voodoo5 5500

The 3Dfx Voodoo5 5500 was released in October 2000 as a last ditch effort to save the company after being overtaken by nVidia and ATi in all respects.

	Released	October 2000
	Bus	PCI or Universal AGP
	Chipset	2 x 3Dfx VSA-100
	Core Clock	166 MHz
	Memory	64 MB SDRAM (2 x 128-bit bus width, 5.2 Gb/sec bandwidth)
	Ports	15-pin DSUB (RGB analogue out)
	Part #
	FCC ID	-
	Price	At launch: $270 to $295
	See Also	Voodoo3 3000, Voodoo4 4500

The Voodoo5 5500 is one of two cards in the 'Voodoo5' family that made it to market (the other was the Voodoo4 4500 that launched a little later as the budget offering). These cards both showcased 3dfx' newest 3D accelerator chip, called VSA, for "Voodoo Scalable Architecture", and the 5500 was the premium variant as it had only two VSA-100 graphics chips onboard and twice the video memory.

VSA-100 was based on the Avenger core, but was enhanced in a number of ways, not least the larger texture cache and 32-bit wide data path for the texture units. Both the core and memory ran at 166 MHz.

Note that Voodoo 5 requires a separate power connection.

Board Revisions

I have no information on various board revisions for the Voodoo5 5500.

Competition

The Voodoo 5 arrived to a market that was now full of multi-texture games, and it was a single-texture card, so it was losing 50% of its fillrate doing two texture layers. Despite this, it was able to outperform both the nVidia GeForce 256 and ATI Rage 128 Maxx (though these models were not the latest from each manufacturer). It lost ground quickly to the nVidia GeForce 2 GTS and ATI Radeon DDR.