Nvidia today announced it is changing the name of its corporation and its GeForce GPU brands to 3dfx in honor of the competitor it obliterated and absorbed more than 20 years ago.
Separately, it announced plans for a new Voodoo 5 6000 card, the infamous board that featured four GPUs lined up on one card. The new Voodoo 5 will be 22 inches long, requiring a special case to house it, comes in a special enclosure filled with chilled liquid and taking up three PCIe slots on the motherboard, and requires its own 1200W-plus power supply separate from the one used in the PC.
However, it is unclear if it can play Crysis.
This is not the first rebranding for the company. Several years ago, Taiwanese-born CEO Jen-Hsun Huang rebranded himself as Jensen and identified as Swedish to prevent the company from being invaded by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.
“The 3dfx brand still has a whole lot of value to us old gamers, but there’s an awful lot of young gamers today who have never heard the name,” said Huang. “This is a chance to bring the name to a whole new generation of players. And let’s face it, GeForce is a dumb name and reminds me of a badly dubbed 1970s Japanese anime TV series featuring Casey Kasem.”
Nvidia also announced plans to release a Founders Edition of the Voodoo 5 6000 for $15,999. Third-party cards from Asus, Gigabyte, and Zotac will also be available for $20,999.