[EDIT]hmmm.....whats going on at AMD? (and history of 3Dfx Rampage)

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Everyone has always speculated about Rampage.  It's hard to believe that it was so far along in its development but it never was released.  You would think that the bankruptcy people would have wanted it to come out.  I guess it just wasn't far enough along.

Was the GeForce 256 the card that Rampage would have competed against?  If so, then Rampage would have been close to 4 times as powerful if the specs are accurate.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=171176

http://www.gpureview.com/GeForce256-DDR-card-114.html

Look at the fill rate and memory bandwidth.

Nope, not a chance. The rampage was the architecture that would have followed the visa-100 which the voodoo5 5500 was based ofF. The vsa-100 was based off the voodoo3 chip. The GeForce 256 would have been old by the time the rampage ever could have launched. The voodoo3 era.

3dfX decided to try to combate nvidia by combining chips on a single board. That's how the vsa-100 came to be. They launched the voodoo 5 5500 but by then, nvidia had the GeForce2.

3DFX never got the planned VSA-100 line up launched before they went under. As a matter of fact, they only release a fraction of it. Two, I believe. The first was the voodoo5 5500 and a few months later came a single chip budget cheaper vsa-100......this was oct-nov in the yr 2000. 3DFX went under not to long after that.

So that's where they were. Still in the middle of rolling out their via-100 line up. The rampage was in its very very early stages. Of course 3DFX was working on a new architecture, as a chip maker you always must be. Chips take years to come into production, years.
So i don't doubt at all there were engineers working on a new design. It would be very strange if they were not. My issue is the statements about it.

The paper specs are one thing but how it actually would perform is another. Then the reality....there is no way that it would have launched in 2000. Even in 2001, if it was feasible at all, it would have had to been late 2001-2002 era. Best case, it would be met with the GeForce3, but you have to think about this for a minute, by February 2002 the GeForce 4 launched.

The rampage paper specs for a single chip aren't all that impressive compared to a geforce2 ultra, which was already out by the time the engineers got the earliest rampage silicon back for testing. The rampage in the blog bofox posted was the 2nd revision which barely got any testing done on it, The first revision was a nightmare. See, there could have been any number of issues.....it was fresh silicon of a brand new architecture. About as fresh as could be.
There is just a lot of fantasy in this story, most of it is.
They had a 2nd revised rampage that booted up, that's literally all there is to it. The rest is invented.

The final evidence that should seal this case shut.....
Nvidia acquired 3DFX...........
If the rampage was so far advanced and this untouchable architecture that was years ahead of everything else, would not have nvidia release this already done chip themselves?

The reality is, nvidia was surely working on GeForce3 if not 4 in the same time period as the rampage. They probably had very early stage silicon in their labs as well.