I don't really understand why a Voodoo 5 6000 has been called a Voodoo 5 6000.... 

This is why I question the naming....

1 VSA-100 chip = Voodoo 4 (4500)
2 VSA-100 chips = Voodoo 5 (5000 & 5500)

so shouldn't 4 VSA-100 chips = Voodoo 6

IE. shouldn't the Voodoo 5 6000 be called the Voodoo 6 6500 or Voodoo 6 6000?

What @NitroX means is that maybe it should have been...

Voodoo 5 - 4500 [Voodoo 4]
Voodoo 5 - 5000 [V5 32MB]
Voodoo 5 - 5500 [V5 64MB]
Voodoo 5 - 6000 [V5 128MB]

...I think?

=\  *sigh*

Just another nail in the coffin for 3dfx it seems.... confusing product line numbering for consumers.

Well, I have a slighty different opinion on this. I think it should have been this way : V4 4500, V4 5500 and V4 6500, since they are all based on the same technology.

Anyway, the 3dfx naming can be explained because of the SLI onboard. Cards with one graphic chip (no SLI) are V4, while cards with more chips are V5.

razrx wrote on 15.08.08 at 01:40:15:


I highly doubt this would've been a contributing factor. I do think that V4 looked like a bit of an afterthought, but ignoring the V3/4/5 thing, simply looking at the model numbers give you a reasonable indication of what to expect when comparing them to each other.

I think it's a pretty ordered naming system in comparison to what has gone by over the years. Starting off, I know when AMD went with their PR-Rating style for their Athlon CPUs it confused a lot of people who weren't aware of the difference between the model and the clockspeed. Since intel changed their focus from raw MHz they too adopted what I think was an even more confusing model scheme. It took quite a while for me to get used to the new model numbers, and while relatively unavoidable, it was still a massive pain to get used to.

So comparitively, it's not so bad. I can't say that 3dfx's marking in the later years was any good, but as far as model names go, it's by far not the worst in my books

Edit: The real question you need to ask is - why did they adopt those specific numbers in the first place?

---dens

Actually, there is a V4 4000 prototype but it has a VSA-101 with SDR-SDRAM.

Daytona was meant as a low-cost oem chip so you probably wouldn't have seen high-end versions. (But if there would have been, they would most likely use SDR-SDRAM because of the bigger width of the memory bus. (DDR: 64bit, SDR: 128bit))

Where did you read that?

NitroX infinity wrote on 15.08.08 at 01:26:06:

Well i think that was the whole idea from the begining. Why i say this because the V5 incorporates all the feature of V2 & V3 combined plus more. They took the two names 2+3=5
This happened in other cases previous with the Apocalypse 5D that was an Apocalypse 3Dx + the 2D part similar to a voodoo rush. No 4d or 6d would have made sense...
Also later on with a totally different type of product the well known Winamp they used all the best characteristics of Winamp 2.x and Winamp 3 when they created Winamp5. Also here no Winamp4.
Back on the Voodoo naming scheme the V4 being an later product they thought they'd fill two gaps: one of the low-end products in their new line-up and one in the generations of Voodoo's.
So i think. Please correct me if my chain of thought is out of order...