The chip has a larger texture cache than its predecessors and the data paths are 32 bits wide rather than 16-bit.

[1][2] A major drawback to this method of performance scaling is that various parts of hardware are needlessly duplicated on the cards and board complexity increases with each additional processor.

This mechanism allows for creation of effects such as motion blur (if used temporally) and anti-aliasing (if used spatially).

The RGSS method of anti-aliasing combines multiple samples of each frame, resulting in higher quality than the brute force ordered-grid over-sampling of ImgTech PowerVR, ATI Radeon DDR and Nvidia GeForce 2.

Designed for scalability, it was nonetheless unrealistic for 3dfx to incrementally increase the number of Voodoo5 chips just to keep pace in performance with rival developments.

The Mac Edition has dual link DVI-D and VGA-A outputs, the other versions just have one VGA-out.

But even had 3dfx survived long enough to launch the Voodoo5 6000, the production cost would have likely hampered its competitiveness from a profitability standpoint.

Due to being burdened with much redundancy and a complicated board, particularly 128MB of RAM, it was projected to have a US$600 price tag, considerably higher than the single-chip GeForce 3 (which was intended by Nvidia to replace the short-lived GeForce 2 Ultra as its flagship product) and Radeon 8500 (US$299) which achieved similar performance in their debut releases with 64MB (although 128 MB versions were later made available).

[14] The Voodoo5 6000's omissions would be apparent for its price, since it did not have next-generation DirectX 8.0 vertex and pixel shaders that would be found in the GeForce 3 and Radeon 8500.

These cards generally had a short life expectancy, and were largely incompatible with various motherboards at the time.

This revision used an Intel PCI bridge chip, was equipped with 128 MB of 5.4ns SDRAM and used a proprietary external 3dfx power supply.

Initial models had the chips mounted in the arrangement seen in the photograph, but this required a PCB with eight circuitry layers (most GeForce 2 cards were four-layer, while the Voodoo 5 5500 was six-layer) and would have been unreasonably expensive.

Most of the problems seen in earlier revisions were fixed, although there may have been glitches while in anti-aliasing mode on some cards.

The successor to the Voodoo 5 series, codenamed "Rampage", was already planned and had been in development for years.

It was supposed to have a smaller semiconductor device fabrication process, support for DDR SDRAM, 200+ MHz core, and a T&L unit.

However, it was early in its development and only approximately twenty working cards were produced before 3dfx went bankrupt, and most assets were purchased by Nvidia in late 2000.