| 3dfx
Interactive - Voodoo 4/5 |
3dfx Interactive
So, at the start of this coverage I told you that press needs press-cards to
gain entry to product presentations. Well, guess what ... I received a
press-release from 3dfx stating that they would be present on the CeBIT and that
they would indeed display the new Voodoo4/5 videocards. Well, the booth showed
Voodoo3's everywhere, but no Voodoo 4 or 5. When I asked about it they told me
that Voodoo 5 was on display in a private booth for invited press only. <-
press-card.
Luckily a visit-card and a little
charm does wonders these days, after pulling some
strings, one of the lovely ladies presented my card to Andrew Humber, PR Manager
from 3dfx interactive. He was kind enough to fit me in his busy schedule for a
personal Voodoo 5 presentation/interview. So here it is boys and girls, pictures
of the first ever Voodoo 5 5000.
The Voodoo 5 above is based on the
version A0 VSA-100 silicon, it still has some
bugs in it and it can't run on the speed that it's supposed to do. The final
Silicon (which is going into mass-production quite soon) will run on 166MHz
compared to the 100 MHz A0 version that was presented to me.
As you can see, this is the fist ever series Voodoo 5 board,
it's still unfinished as you can see condensators and other pieces of hardware.
The Voodoo5 will have active fans on
it's VSA-100
processor. Although this is not needed 3dfx claimed that they had learned from
the issues with Voodoo3. The Voodoo3 chipset runs incredible hot. The fact that
it is hot is not a problem for the chipset. However, the consumer is simply not
happy with that solution, so therefore the new generation will have active fans.
I've also been told that Voodoo 4/5, by far, will not run as hot as the Voodoo3.
That would be a bit of a contradiction since the VSA-100 consumes lot's
of power, and everything that consumes energy will produce heat.
Since we're on the subject
power-consuming, I've been able to verify that the VSA-100 processor
will take up about 15-17 WATT. Therefore the Voodoo5 5000 series will
indeed draw power directly from the power supply and not from the mainboard
anymore. This should also solve many of the mainboard problems that for example
the GeForce chipset experiences.
Hey there is also a new kid on the
block, Macintosh is a huge new market for 3dfx, they have shown me
POD-Racer running on a MAC. And I must say .. it was running pretty darn well. So,
MAC owners .. be prepared for some real 3D power.
On the MAC they showed me how powerful Full-Scene
Anti-aliasing (FSA) is. I am one of those people who is very skeptic about this issue. I
strongly believe that in higher resolutions (1280 and above) you will not need
FSA. Unfortunately they where only able to show me resolutions in 800x600 and
1024x768 pixels, therefor this issue cannot be proved yet. After seeing FSA on and
of ... well, I must admit, it does make a huge
difference, and indeed it does look much better. The good thing about FSA is
that it will support every game that exists. You won't need to upgrade your
games with patches or whatever. It's simply a new hardware feature.
Next platform, the PC. 3dfx had connected two PC's through a
network together running a special Quake III arena version that supports FSA and Motion Blur. Now, the Motion Blur looks really cool. It's a very neat
movie effect. Have you seen the Matrix (of course you did) Do you remember the
scene on the roof where they dodge bullets ? That was motion blur. PC1 was running
a Voodoo 5 5000 in 800x600x32 pixels, PC 2 was running a Voodoo 3 3000 in
1024x768x16. With FSA PC1 was looking by far better.
We will review the new Voodoo 5 somewhere in April.
Voodoo 4/5 is going to launched somewhere in Spring 2000, we can
expect the first cards to arrive in April/May, a big thanks to 3dfx for giving
me the product-briefing.
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