Voodoo Extreme's Reverend Pulprit heeft een speculaties over de 3dfx Napalm (lijkt erop dat 3dfx die naam zal handhaven, dus geen 'Voodoo4') gepost:
'll throw in my own little speculation as to how the Napalm will be, in terms of technology, some specs and well, other things cropping up in my mind. Bear in mind, the following are just my "suspicions" and is MOST DEFINITELY not something privy to me :Clock speed: Probably somewhere around 250MHz per chip. Possibly based on 0.22micron fab, perhaps even 0.18micron due to the delay till Q1'2000.
Fill Rates and Pipelines:
Probably dual pixel and dual texel per clock cycle pipelines (unlike their current Voodoo3, which has dual texel but single pixel per clock pipeline). This would result in similar specs for pixel and texel fill rates. Also, probably multi-chip solution. Works just like the Voodoo2-SLI capability, with possible single chip, dual chips and quad chips configurations (tri chips may not be technically feasible). Thus, perhaps three different retail board configurations. Or perhaps, additionally, the possibility of "upgrading" a single chip board to dual and/or quad chip board by way of adding on chips to existing board (hey, if I speculate, why not all the way? :-) And so, with the two assumptions above, fill rates could theoretically be :
Single-chip - 250MHz x 2pipelines = 500MegaPixels/MegaTexels per second
Dual chips - 250MHz x 2pipelines x 2chips = 1000MegaPixels/MegaTexels per second (1000Mega=1Giga=1 billion)
Quad chips - 250MHz x 2pipelines x 4chips = 2000MegaPixels/MegaTexels per secondOn board memory: Possibly 32MB, 64MB or 128MB fast speed SDRAM or all three as options/configurations. 32MB may seem remote possibility due to other technologies like T-Buffer and FXT1. May not have DDR memory, possibly "just" memory speed equal to chip clock speed Technology
Most probably includes all of the following :
- T-Buffer
- FXT1 texture compression (compatible with DirectX's
- S3TC texture compression) 32bit internal and external rendering output- Large texture size support (possibly, but not probably, up to 2048x2048) AGP4X
- Bump-mapping : Emboss definitely, dot-product possibly, environment-mapped unlikely. All should be performed single cycle, if exists. Possibly separate power supply or a connector for such due to multiple chip configuration power needs/consumption Probably 10 million triangles per second, or more
...and very probably this - NO on-board geometry (T&L) processor :-(
