Big is good

Those of you who were around in the days of the Voodoo 2 may well remember a company named Obsidian, who won some press attention by developing an enormously powerful quad Voodoo 2, which retailed at around £500 in the States. Of course nobody in the gaming sector bought it, but it was one of the first truly powerful 3D graphics cards available to industry. I personally sat there long and hard peering into my PC screen at the images of this beast, wondering whether power like that would ever be available to consumers like us. But like the Voodoo 2 itself, with the advent of the Voodoo 3 and the TNT2, it was quickly forgotten.. Forgotten, that is, until last week at Comdex, when we spied the latest creation from Obsidian, an eight-way SLI VSA-100 graphics card. The pictures are at HardOCP, here and here. Just to give you an idea of what this sort of card would be capable of, a Voodoo 5 5500 is a little way behind current technology in terms of performance, but it has two chips and 64Mb of VRAM. This board has eight chips, and god knows how much memory - to the Voodoo 5 5500 it's the equivalent of a Ferrari to a Fiesta. If only, eh?