The upcoming 3Dfx Voodoo3 is actually nothing much different from what we
thought would be called 'Banshee 2'. 3Dfx decided against this name since
Banshee doesn't really have the very best reputation and because the new
chip is meant to win the crown of the 2D/3D accelerator chips, so that it
should well deserve the promising name 'Voodoo3'.
The features of Voodoo3 read like this:
Dual 32-bit texture rendering architecture
32 bit internally, but 16 bit externally, then interpolated by the special
RAMDAC, leading to a color depth of around 22 bit
True multi-texturing: 2 textures per pixel per cloc
means either one pixel per clock that's rendered using two texture
maps or 2 pixels per clock using normal bi-linear filtering of one
texture
Full hardware setup of triangle parameters
nothing special, that's common these days
Support for multi-triangle strips and fans
also common now
Single Pass, Single-cycle bump mapping
using multi (dual) texturing, no special hardware routine, this means
one bump mapped pixel can be rendered per clock
Single Pass, Single-cycle tri-linnear mip-mapping
same as above, means one tri-linearly filtered pixel can be rendered
per clock
Alpha Blending on source and destination pixels
Sub-pixel and sub texel correction to 0.4x0.4 resolution
Per-pixel atmospheric fog with programmable fog zones
Full-scene polygon-based edge anti-aliasing
Floating point Z buffer (W buffer)
this Z-buffer is only 16 bit deep though
True per-pixel, LOD MIP mapping with biasing and clamping
Texture composting for multi-texture special effects
8-tap anisotropic filtering
Support for 14 texture map formats
8-bit palletized textures with full bilinear filtering
Texture compression through narrow-channel YAB format
this is an interesting feature, proving that texture compression will be
the future for all 3D chip makers
Texel Fill Rates 366 Mtexels/sec (Voodoo3 3000), 250
Mtexels/sec (Voodoo3 2000)
Voodoo3 3000 will thus have a tiny bit higher fill rate than Voodoo2
SLI, but it can use it up to 1600x1200 and above
Triangle Rate 7 million triangles/sec (Voodoo3 3000), 4 million
triangles/sec (Voodoo3 2000)
this rate is fine, but so far there are hardly any games out that would
ask for only 1 million triangles/sec. It only states that the 8 million
triangles/sec of TNT-2 won't make this chip really faster. Fill rate is
more important right now.
RAMDAC 350 MHz(Voodoo3 3000), 300 MHz RAMDAC (Voodoo3
2000), allowing resolutions of up to 2048x1536 at 75 Hz refresh
this feature really rocks the boat. There is no chip announced that
would have such a fast RAMDAC
Core Graphics Clock 183 MHz (Voodoo3 3000), 125 MHz
(Voodoo3 2000)
using .25 micron technology
32 MB onboard memory support (was only 16 MB at first)
ATI will make 32 MB local memory a common thing with Rage 128
soon, thus 3Dfx changed the specs and will support 32 MB also.
DVD acceleration
this doesn't me
