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

To: Ben Wu who wrote (10653)	2/13/1999 7:37:00 PM
From: Patrick Grinsell	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 16960

Megapixel and Megatexel... I'm going from memory on this so anybody correct me if I'm wrong. When we talk in terms of megapixels being the limit, we are talking the number of millions of pixels that can fill the screen every second. Each pixel represents one dot. When we talk in terms of megatexel, it is the number of texels applied to each pixel per second. What's the difference? Well Voodoo2 can do two texels for each pixel in one pass...this is the single pass multitexturing. Here are the specs for Voodoo2: 90 megapixels/sec 180 megatexels/sec If the Voodoo2 had 3 texturing units, it would be 270 megatexels per second. So you can see if Rampage has 4+ texturing passes that we should easily break 1000. The TNT works differently. NVIDIA claims 180 megapixels per second, but slows down to 90 megpixles per second when it multitextures. So here are the specs: 180 megapixels/sec 180 megatexels/sec Unlike the Voodoo2, the TNT actually uses the second texturing pipeline if it isn't multitexturing. Of course this kinda begs the question, "Why would you ever want to use multitexturing on the TNT?" Certianly there is no performance benefit. The only thing I can think is that there might be a reduction in quantization errors. To answer your question about TNT2 and Voodoo3, it would appear that Voodoo3 will be much faster in multitexturing games than the TNT2(366M texel vs. 250M texels), but the TNT2 will have the advantage in single textured games (250M pixel vs. 183M pixel). I would take all NVIDIA claims with a grain of salt though. Most new games (like quake3) will have multitexturing. Pat