3dfx
"Did I say fillrate was king? I meant to say FSAA was king" - Brian Burke
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Current card lineup: Voodoo4 4500, Voodoo5 5500 PCI, Voodoo5 5500 AGP
Est. Street Price Range: ($139-$250 USD)
Pros: By far the best FSAA, T-buffer effects, Fastest Card for Unreal engine powered games, Glide compatibility.
Cons: Limited features, needs external power source, really huge freak'en card, slowest card of the three
Future Cards: Rampage, Voodoo5 6000 (It will ship, it will I swear)
Recommended User: Anyone who plays a lot of older games, anyone who likes the idea of a video card you have to plug into a wall outlet, Voodoo cultists.
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 3dfx, who started out as 3Dfx, was once posed to rule the 3D video card market when it was blind-sided by NVIDIA. 3Dfx, in its race to be the fastest, left out 32-bit colour, and only had support for 256KB textures in its Voodoo3 card. The result was a fast card with poor image quality compared to its competition. On top of that, NVIDIA's TNT2 was nearly as fast as the Voodoo3 and supported 32-bit colour and 2MB textures. Furthurmore, 3dfx's acquisition of STB didn't go as well as planned and 3dfx had some problems releasing some of its cards (namely the Voodoo3 3500). Then the company's CEO stepped down and after all the above, 3dfx started missing product cycles (ahem, the Voodoo5 6000 anyone?).
In spite of all that the Voodoo4 & Voodoo5 are good cards, but not what a lot of people had hoped for. The Voodoo4 is a single-processor card, and the Voodoo5 is a dual-processor card (someday, we're told, the Voodoo5 6000, 4-processor card will ship); all are powered by the VS-100 chip. Though this allows for a faster card at lower frame rates, it causes problems at higher resolutions/colours because all the chips share the same memory and memory bandwidth. It also prevents the card from going any higher than 1x AGP.
 FSAA (Full Screen Anti-Aliasing) improves visual quality for some, while it worsens it for others--it seems to depend on what you find important in your image. Simply put, FSAA renders an image larger than you've set your display for and then shrinks it down to fit. In this process, jaggies at the edge of polygons are greatly reduced--unfortunately, so are many fine lines. While both NVIDIA and ATI have FSAA support, neither have the image quality nor the speed that 3dfx has in their Voodoo4/5 products.
[Ed: Correction - A few readers have mentioned that the method for FSAA on the Voodoo4/5 is different from the above-mentioned. I had known about this fact, but didn't catch this mistake in the editing process.
The method that 3dfx uses is called RGSS (Rotated Grid SuperSampling) and works by rendering the same frame a certain number of times (2 renderings per frame for 2X FSAA and 4 renderings per frame for 4X FSAA) and then places them offset by a pixel on the screen. This, in effect, blurs the scene.]
3dfx also has other "T-buffer" effects such as motion blur, but has yet to really show them off other than one (quite large) video download of Quake III with motion blur on. For a more in-depth review of the Voodoo5, try this article.
The Hard Stuff
Though the features that 3dfx has listed for its chip looks impressive, it's actually smaller than the Geforce2, way to go marketing :)
- Dual pixel pipeline: 2-pixels/clock (single texture) or 2 textures/clock (single pixel)
- Full-scene anti-aliasing in hardware:
- Single-chip: 2-sample
- 2-way SLI: 4-sample
- Full hardware setup of triangle parameters
- Supports multi-triangle strips & fans
- Transparency/chroma-key with dedicated color mask
- Alpha blending of source & destination pixels
- Sub-pixel & sub-texel correction to 0.4x0.4 resolution
- Per-pixel atmospheric fog with programmable fog zones
- Dynamic environment mapping
- Perspective-correct true divide-per-pixel 3D texture mapping & Gouraud shading
- Single-cycle bump mapping
- Single-cycle trilinear mip-mapping
- True per-pixel Level of Detail (LOD) MIP-mapping with biasing & clamping
- RGB modulation combines textures & shaded pixels
- Texture compositing for multi-texture special effects
- All DirectX 7 & OpenGL 1.2 texture blends
- Support for 14 different texture map formats
- 8-bit palletized textures with full bilinear filtering
- 4-bit-per-texel texture compression through Microsoft DirectX & 3dfx proprietary algorithms
The Voodoo5 has a core/memory clock of 166/166Mhz, with each chip having two texture units with two pipelines. Though the Voodoo5 is listed as a 64MB card, its two processors each use part of the memory, so it isn't all available for textures. I couldn't find much information on true fill rate, or triangles per second. I suspect that two processors make the information hard to really decipher. Or maybe I'm too lazy to really look for it.
[Ed: The theoretical fill rate for the Voodoo4 is 333-367-MPixels/s, 667-733-MPixels/s for the Voodoo5 5000/5500 and for the yet-to-be-released Voodoo5 6000, 1.32 to 1.47-GigaPixels/s. Source - 3dfx website]
Overclocking
Like the Radeon, the Voodoo5 has its core/memory synced, so they must be moved together. Everything I have read states you might get up to 200mhz, but you'll hardly notice the speed difference. Of course free speed is free speed...
Bottom Line
Good card all around. A great card if FSAA is your bag (absolutely fantastic with older games like
Half-Life). If FSAA doesn't turn your crank, go elsewhere.
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