Ooh, spinny!
Now this is something you don’t really come across every day. A complete in box 3Dfx Voodoo Rush, complete with all accessories. Driver CD? Check. Pack-in games? Check. All the manuals and pamphlets you can imagine for something like this? For sure.
And of course, let’s not forget about the card itself.
The Voodoo Rush is a pretty unique card compared to most other graphics cards even from the era. Unlike the Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2, it’s not a purely 3D card incapable of rendering 2D graphics. At the same time, it’s also not one of the increasingly-common all-in-one cards capable of both 2D and 3D in a single chip. It’d take the Voodoo Rush’s successor, the Voodoo Banshee, for 3Dfx to accomplish that themselves.
Instead, the Voodoo Rush chipset (and I really do mean chipset) is produced by 3Dfx in partnership with Alliance Semiconductor and Macronix, although cards featuring a chip from the former are far more common than the latter. Both Alliance and Macronix’s chips feature a special dedicated bus that allows them to sacrifice a chunk of what would otherwise be their memory buses to connect to video memory to communicate with the pair of 3Dfx chips to the right of the card. These two chips together handle the framebuffer and texture mapping, and were essentially a cut-down Voodoo 1 in terms of performance.
The Alliance Semiconductor chip is also a curiosity in itself, and although officially, the Alliance AT25 is distinct from the AT3D, it is believed that the AT25 is in fact just a rebranded AT3D with the 3D features disabled at the driver level. I have yet to test this myself however, but a writeup on the AT3D can be found here.
As far as the pack-in games go, this particular boxed set includes Pandemonium, Formula 1 Racing, and Star Wars Shadow of the Empire: Battle of Hoth. I found the latter two games very fun to play, especially for pack-in games included with what was meant to be a budget graphics card. Pandemonium was a neat 3D side-scrolling platformer, but I didn’t feel that it was nearly as enjoyable in comparison. Further thoughts on the pack-in games are included in the linked Youtube video I made alongside this post:
All in all though, for a budget graphics card originally released in 1997 put into a scenario where it’s now paired with roughly 1999-ish hardware, the Voodoo Rush turned out to be a far better experience than I’d expected. At least, when only considering the pack-in games. Partly for length reasons, I opted not to try any other games on the Rush besides the three pack-in games, but I do plan on doing a follow-up video covering additional titles.
High-resolution scans of the box and all of its contents alongside disk images of all four CDs are uploaded to Archive.org and TheRetroWeb.