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To: James Sinclair who wrote (4794)	6/27/1998 4:22:00 PM
From: stephen wall	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

James, 1) Report on Banshee from EET: eet.com SAN JOSE, Calif. - 3Dfx Interactive Inc. has provided details of its long-anticipated Banshee 2-D/3-D processor, a 128-bit device that could make the company an instant contender in the highly competitive OEM graphics-chip market. The single-chip device includes homegrown 2-D technology that 3Dfx claims outperforms its rivals, and a 3-D engine that draws from - though does not quite match - many features of its acclaimed Voodoo 2 graphics chip set. Although its Voodoo line of graphics accelerator cards has been regarded as one of the best 3-D graphics engines for PCs, 3Dfx has not had much experience in 2-D graphics, and in the past, has had to rely on Alliance Semiconductor to provide the 2-D graphics engine to complement its Voodoo chip set. The company knew that would have to change if it wanted to compete in the mainstream graphics market with a single-chip design. With its Voodoo Banshee chip, 3Dfx set out to prove that it could not only do 2-D, but could take it to new heights. Starting with a clean slate, the company built its own 128-bit VGA engine and hardware support for every 2-D API function and subroutine, so that no processing-intensive aspect of 2-D acceleration would burden the CPU. What you get is a processor that can directly accept polygon vertices without software emulation, and can execute all 256 raster operations in a single pass without using off-screen memory. Banshee is also one of the few graphics controllers to support the block-write feature of synchronous graphics RAMs, which boosts the polygon and pattern fills and z-buffer clears to 128 bytes per clock, vs. 16 bytes without the feature. "Traditionally for 2-D, what isn't supported in hardware, you have to do in software," said Saul Altabet, director of product marketing for 3Dfx. "The philosophy behind Banshee was to put as much into the hardware as possible. The outgrowth of that was that we use a very thin driver and get better performance." Banshee's 3-D engine includes some features brought to bear with its Voodoo architecture. Banshee has the ability to divide the frame buffer memory into tiles that are displayed in a sequence, a feature that was highlighted by Microsoft's now-defunct Talisman 3-D project. But the feature was considered important enough to be incorporated by other 3-D chip makers in their devices. What's different about Banshee is that it can also toggle back to linear memory organization when running 2-D. "It knows which region to address it for both types of frame buffer organizations," he said. "This will be a great feature for things like [Microsoft's] Chrome, in which you're doing 3-D embedded in a window." Like its high-end Voodoo 2 chip set, Banshee is also geared to handle out-of-order commands used by Intel's Pentium-II processor. This saves the graphics subsystem from having to store the data from the CPU in main memory and reorder it before sending it to the graphics device. Altabet said 3Dfx has filed for a patent on this technology, and expects it will become a more-prominent feature in the near future. Other rendering features of Banshee that mirror Voodoo 2 are per-pixel MIP mapping, 32-bit-per-pixel rendering that can be dithered down to 16 bits, a programmable fog table and a floating-point z-buffer. More-advanced features include dynamic-environment mapping for reflective lighting effects, bump-mapping, trilinear-MIP mapping, edge anti-aliasing and 2-K x 2-K surface rendering. Because the 0.35-micron Banshee chip runs at 100 MHz, its raw fill rate of 100 million pixels per second is actually faster than the 90 MHz Voodoo 2's 90 mp/s. But Voodoo 2's texel fill rate, which measures bilinear textured pixels and is considered by 3Dfx as a better indicator of performance, is rated at 180 million texels/second, while Banshee remains at 100 mt/s. Yet Altabet said 3Dfx never set out to beat the performance of Voodoo 2, which is made up of a pixel unit chip and two texture units, but has aimed to offer a single chip device designed to run the 250 3-D games optimized for 3Dfx that are expected to be on store shelves by the end of the year. Indeed, it's the company's hope that the name recognition it has earned with its high-end graphics cards and increasing number of titles geared for its Glide API will give OEMs an added incentive to design Banshee into their forthcoming PCs. "We took the Voodoo 2 core and put it into Banshee. The key premise was to keep Voodoo compatibility," Altabet said. "It was very hard to tell our engineers not to put in new stuff. For example, we could have gone with higher resolutions like 32-bit color, but it would have broken Voodoo compatibility." One conspicuously absent feature was support for 133-MHz AGP, which most new graphics controllers introduced this year have adopted. Banshee does support the slower 66-MHz AGP with sidebanding, but Altabet downplayed the need for the faster AGP for the Voodoo architecture. "We don't see AGP as being that critical," he said. "Voodoo graphics has already been known for fast downloading of textures and fast rendering." 3Dfx is now offering samples of the Banshee processor, and will begin selling it in production volumes by the third quarter for $38 per chip. The company expects Banshee will be granted Microsoft's Windows Hardware Qualification Lab certification, which is considered a requirement for OEMs to participate in Windows branding, before the device moves into production. 2) Another article on Wintel video workstations. Intel demoing Intergraph workstations with 3dfx chips? eet.com At PC Expo in New York this past week, Intergraph got perhaps the biggest boost it could have hoped for. There, a prominent section of Intel's booth was devoted to an Intergraph TDZ2000 GL2 workstation equipped with dual Pentium II processors. The setup included graphics accelerators based on the Real3D chip from 3dfx Inc. and three monitors tied together to display sequential views of motion video generated by the Realimation software from Realimation Inc.