Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Joe C. who wrote (5831)	7/27/1998 11:43:00 PM
From: Jeff Lins	Respond to of 16960

Regarding the Gamespot review... I don't think it's very nice to say that you won't publish benchmarks since it isn't fair (on alpha hardware), then say that quake was running "slowly." "Slowly" is a useless term in the computer world. I know people that think less than 60 fps is slow. To not show a benchmark, followed by a subjective statement...not good journalism... He goes on to compare the Banshee alpha to TNT and Savage, saying they look more complete. EVERY review I have seen for Savage has games that will not run and that crash the whole setup. And Every review of TNT has been at half the final clockspeed and on early drivers. Maybe things go a bit "schitzoid" on the TNT when you turn up the mHz... And how about the bit about "it might run a bit hot" due to being a .35 micron part? What is that about? EVERYBODY is doing .35! The texture thing seems significant, but I am sure it will be worked out. All-in-all, this was a waste of an article. Wouldn't want to be unfair and print benchmarks, but its ok to mention that the board runs "slowly" on quake, is "schitzoid" and has texture problems. ------------ Now how come nobody wants to discuss the direct sales thing? Hey Chip, get the ball rolling... ----------- Review from bootnet: bootnet.com dropped off Banshee reference board last Friday, and based on our preliminary tests over the weekend, it's a screamer. Before you get to the nitty gritty details however, be aware that the board was delivered with these limitations: Beta version of the Banshee chip (the final version will be further optimized) Alpha drivers The board contains 8MB; the shipping version will have 16MB. The first Banshee parts will be manufactured using 0.35 micron fabrication and will use either SDRAM or SGRAM at 100MHz memory bus, offering 100MPixels 3D fill rate. It will be later changed to 0.25micron, at which point it'll run at 125 MHz, pumping out a whopping 125MPixels fill rate. TV-out comes standard with both S-Video and composite video connections available. The reference board also has a 5V fan, something the production board won't require (although it will be shipped with a heat sink). 3Dfx claims Banshee will have the world's fastest 2D performance because of its direct hardware polygon support. Regardless of how fast the final product may actually be, we found its quality to be both sharp and extremely fast, even at the maximum resolution of 1600x1200 at 75Mhz with 32-bit color depth. REALWORLD BENCHMARK RESULTS: * 3Dfx Canopus Matrox Banshee Pure3D Millenium Voodoo2 G200 ForsakenMark (D3D) 800x600 b98.61fps c58.7fps m58.14fps ForsakenMark (D3D) 1024x768 b58.61fps cN/A m46.14fps Quake II (OpenGL) 800x600 b33.1fps c55.7fps m26.5fps Quake II (OpenGL) 1024x768 b21.8fps cN/A m17.3fps (b=banshee, c=canopus m=matrox: sorry that I couldn't get the tables to work out; just click the link to boot net!) We were somewhat blown away by Banshee's Direct3D Forsaken scores. Was VSync turned off? Guess what? It wasn't! Thinking that feature may be broken, we reduced the refresh down to 75MHz, at which point the frame-rate dropped to 75. Believe it or not, you get 98fps at 800x600 in Forsaken! Visual quality was good, although it's over-filtered just like Voodoo2. There were no noticeable glitches except for D3D games running in high resolutions. At 1024x768 in Forsaken for example, there are definite alpha-blending issues. Texture deformaties (such as Predator-esque ripple effects) are apparent in all D3D resolutions, however, D3D polygon throughput has not yet been optimized. The biggest limitation with Banshee resides in its AGP 1X architecture. Banshee is designed around the Voodoo2 core which is optimized to texture from local memory only. This means newer games that take full advantage of AGP 2x's sidebanding from system memory won't get that support with Banshee. They'll only get access to the memory that resides on the Banshee board. But, since few games currently take advantage of full AGP compliance right now anyway, Banshee may be all you need to tide you over until next year's offering from the 3D gods. Here's Banshee's complete feature set: 3D Feature Set: Integrated Voodoo2 pixel unit and single texture unit 100 Mpixel/s fill rate 100 Mtexel/s fill rate HW triangle setup capable of 4M tri/s On-chip high speed texture cache unit High precision 16-bit floating point Z-buffer Transparency and chroma-key with color mask Alpha blending on source and destination pixels Dynamic environment maps 24-bit color dithering to native 16-bit RGB 16-bit color "expansion" to display near 24-bit quality Per-pixel table based fog/haze effects Full scene, edge anti-aliasing Bump mapping Optimized for local memory texturing Sub-pixel and sub-texel correction Perspective corrected 3D texture mapping Palletized and compressed textures Video sub-system: VMI host and video input ports Double or triple buffering of incoming video Packed or planar YUV 4:2:2 Bilinear vertical and horizontal filtering Hardware color-space-conversion Digital video output for NTSC/PAL encoders 2D feature set: 100MHz 128-bit GUI accelerator Full featured 128-bit BitBlt engine Hardware Bresenham line drawing engine Hardware polygon generation and fill engine Source and destination chroma-keying Advanced single cycle block-write Full 256 Raster Operations in hardware Other features: PCI 66MHz and AGP with sideband signaling High speed memory with duplicate RAS support Dual command FIFO for CPU parallelism 256-bit internal buffering for maximum memory efficiency PC '97 and PC '98 compliant 250MHz RAMDAC 4-16MB SGRAM/SDRAM Frame Buffer