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Technology Stocks : 3DFX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric Howard who wrote (13626)	7/6/1999 8:11:00 PM
From: David Krafcsik	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

The Goods on Voodoo 4!!! Nice little half page news item in the August issue of Computer Gaming World on the Voodoo 4. They are claiming the info is from an "industry source who requested anonymity". It does say that T&L won't be directly supported as initially shipped BUT there will be a socket on the card for a T&L co-processor. Here's the full article: "Just when you thought it was safe to buy yourself a 3D card.... We did a little digging recently and hit the mother lode. While 3dfx is out there singing the praises of Voodoo-3, the company's designers are working hard on its next new chipset, code named Napalm." "Much of the criticism of the Voodoo-3 has focused on its lack of some advanced rendering features (bump-mapping, stencil buffer) and its lack of 32-bit color support. The latter shortcoming will become more critical when games like Quake3:Arena ship later this year. It appears that the Napalm will address most of the criticisms leveled against the Voodoo-3." "For starters, Napalm, like nearly all 3dfx chips to precede it, will be damned fast. How fast? According to an industry source who requested anonymity, they're aiming for 800 MPixels/sec. At that rate , Napalm will be more than double the fastest current shipping parts. That much processing power should deliver resolutions of 1600x1200x32 at decent frame rates. How are they going to do that? Our speculation is that Napalm will have an architecture with two rendering pipelines, and that each one will be able to handle one pixel per clock. A clock rate set to 200MHz would yield 400 MPixels/sec." "In addition to speed and lots of it, Napalm will be capable of handling 32-bit textures, and it will have a plug in socket for a transform-and-lighting coprocessor in preparation for DirectX 7, where that part of the pipeline will be exposed for acceleration. nVidia has also announced its intent to inorporate T/L acceleration in their next chipset, due out sometime this fall." "We've even heard a rumor that 3dfx's Napalm may be SLI-capable when it debuts, allowing two boards to work in parallel. The net result is those gamers who are truly performance-obsessed may be able to get a fill rate of 800 MPixels/sec. To help keep this pipeline moving, Napalm will also support AGP 4X. This may seem like an insane amount of rendering horsepower, but Sony has announced PlayStation 2's specs, and is claiming a fill-rate of about 1.2 GPixels/sec." "This news begs the question: Should you even consider Voodoo-3? It depends. If you need to upgrade now, and you want Glide support, the Voodoo-3 2000 is a great gargain at $129 (see this months magnum 3D card feature). But if your performance is still solid on the games you like to play, and you can hold off, then wait until that new game you've brought home stutters and lurches. and if your best tricks for upping the frame rate (getting the latest driver version, dialing down some rendering goodies) don't work, then consider making a move." "So the race is on the break the 1 GigaPixel/sec barrier, and 3dfx is pulling out all the stops to be the first company to get there. But it won't be alone. We've heard distant rumblings that nVidia is also working towards being one of the first to pass that milestone. In the 3D graphics business, there's just no rest for the wicked." Additional note (by Dave K.): 400 MPixels/sec didn't sound fast to me at first, but then I realized that the current Voodoo-3 and TnT2 parts are doing about 350 MTexels/sec, their fill rate is actually half this speed in Pixels. This makes more sense when in the article they are talking about two rendering pipelines at 200 MHz each. Thus, two of these babies in SLI should be 3 to 4 times faster than the current batch of video cards. :)