NVIDIA Resurrects 3Dfx Brand Name – Announces 3dfx Voodoo 590 Graphics Card
This morning, NVIDIA announced it was resurrecting the 3Dfx brand for a new lineup of high-end GPU products. For the past ten years, a group of ex-3dfx veterans at NVIDIA have been leading a secret double life. In the day time, they fulfill their duties as NVIDIA employees, designing, building, and marketing GeForce graphics processors. In their spare time, and with the company’s tacit consent, they’ve been working on a revolutionary graphics card based on 3dfx technology. After ten years of secretive development, they are finally ready to show the world what they’ve created. This morning the company announced the 3dfx Voodoo 590. “We named it the 590 because it matches the GeForce GTX 590 in fillrate–an essential metric in graphics performance. Both cards saturate at 77.7 Gigatexels per second, the only difference being that the Voodoo 590 is built using 3dfx technology from ten years ago.”
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. While the Voodoo 590 is a hugely impressive piece of engineering, will it be competitive? “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. Burke was reluctant when asked about power requirements.
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