To: jttmab who wrote (8998 ) 11/16/1998 11:54:00 AM From: James Sinclair Respond to of 16960
Official Announcement LAS VEGAS, COMDEX, Nov. 16 /PRNewswire/ -- 3Dfx Interactive(R) Inc. (NASDAQ:TDFX) today announced its Voodoo3(TM) product family, a range of integrated single chips that expand on the award-winning Voodoo2(TM) and Voodoo Banshee(TM) architecture to deliver the world's fastest 3D and 2D performance and support ultra high-definition displays. The first members of the product family, which are expected to be available commercially the second quarter of 1999, include the pin-compatible Voodoo3 2000 for the PC-OEM market and the Voodoo3 3000 for the retail add-in-board market. "3D is one of the fastest growing segments in computing and Voodoo3's unprecedented 3D and 2D performance will enable our enthusiast gamers as well as mainstream consumers to experience the next generation of highly complex 3D interactive entertainment," said Greg Ballard, president and chief executive officer for 3Dfx Interactive. "Voodoo3 answers the exploding demand for realistic graphics and no-compromise performance." World's Fastest 3D & 2D With its dual, 32-bit rendering pipelines, Voodoo3 can generate greater than 7 million triangles per second utilizing its 100-billion operations per second 3D architecture. Voodoo3 delivers more than twice the triangle performance of two Voodoo2 boards in the Scan Line Interleave (SLI) format -- currently the industry's fastest 3D graphics configuration. The Voodoo3 family utilizes the 3Dfx patented full-speed, single-cycle, single-pass multi- texturing, which enables critical features such as hardware accelerated bump- mapping and trilinear mip-mapping at 60 frames per second for today's most demanding entertainment titles. Voodoo3 integrates the world's fastest 2D core from Voodoo Banshee, the Ziff-Davis Business Graphics Winbench(R) 99 leader, which includes a dedicated high speed 128-bit interface and an internal 256-bit datapath for optimized memory utilization. Additionally, Voodoo3 features the industry's most complete hardware acceleration of the Microsoft Windows Graphics Driver Interface (GDI). Optimized for PC-OEM & Retail The Voodoo3 product family will debut with two new products, the Voodoo3 2000 and the Voodoo3 3000. Targeted at the mainstream PC-OEM motherboard and add-in-board markets, the Voodoo3 2000 is capable of achieving a maximum fill rate of 250-megatexels per second, while the enthusiast-targeted Voodoo3 3000 is capable of delivering greater than 366-megatexels per second fill rate performance. The pin-compatible AGP 2X Voodoo3 2000 and 3000 are optimized for Intel's 440 LX/BX AGP chipset. In the first half of 1999, an AGP 4X version will be available for shipment with Intel's new AGP 4X chipsets to meet PC-OEM production requirements. The Voodoo3 2000 and 3000 support both SGRAM and SDRAM memory, as well as the Windows 95/98/2000, MAC OS, Unix, and Linux operating systems. Ultra High-Resolution Display Voodoo3 supports ultra high-resolution display on PC monitors, LCD flat panels and high definition television sets (HDTV). With the world's fastest integrated RAMDAC at 350MHz, Voodoo3 achieves resolutions of up to 2048 x 1536 at a full 75Hz screen refresh rate, making it the only graphics chip able to support new proposed high-resolution display specifications from the VESA committee. Voodoo3 also connects directly to 3Dfx's LCDfx(TM) chip to support high- resolution LCD flat panel displays. LCDfx features unique sub-pixel image scaling technology that provides significant image quality improvement over conventional two-tap scaling filters. MPEG2/DVD Video Acceleration Additionally, Voodoo3 provides hardware DVD acceleration support to ensure 30 frames per second playback with no dropped frames. Coupled with the latest software MPEG2 codecs, Voodoo3 off-loads up to 40 percent of CPU overhead, enabling the CPU to do other tasks while playing DVD content. Complete Voodoo Compatibility Voodoo3 provides complete compatibility with the largest installed base of enhanced 3D entertainment titles available; more than 500 entertainment titles are expected to be available by the end of the year. Voodoo3 is optimized for Microsoft's Direct X6 application programming interface (API), as well as other standard API's including Glide(R) from 3Dfx and OpenGL from Silicon Graphics. Pricing and Availability With 8.2 million transistors and manufactured in an advanced .25 micron CMOS process, Voodoo3 is designed for optimal performance on both Pentium II and future CPUs from Intel, as well as the AMD-K6(R)-2 processor featuring 3DNow!(R) technology. TheVoodoo3 products will be sampling in December and are scheduled to be in volume production the second quarter of 1999. Pricing for the Voodoo3 2000 is expected to start at $35 in quantities of 10,000 units, while pricing for the Voodoo3 3000 is expected to start at $45 in quantities of 10,000 units.