Beyond3D heeft het eerste deel van hun Comdex verslag online gezet, met errug goede info over de 3dfx Voodoo4/5. Zo blijkt het <kuch> super elegante </kuch> design van de Voodoo5 6000 een dikke 60Watt vermogen te gaan gebruiken:
The 6000 is interesting in that it has an independent chip to handle the multiple chips. The chip supplied by Intel, solves issues related to the AGP bus. The purpose of the chip, according to Scott, "is to isolate the AGP bus from the 4 chips on the V5 6000. We need electrical isolation on the design, otherwise we would have too heavily loaded an AGP bus slot. The Intel part serves as a bridge between the AGP bus and the 4 rendering engines..." What is really interesting about this board is how the power problem is worked out. As we know, a dual chip 64 MB board is already required to be connected to the system board supply, but for the 6000 this isn't even enough. The 6000 is going to require 50 - 60 watts of power according to Sellers. Shipping with the it will be a dedicated power supply that can deliver 100 watts, more than enough for what is required. It will be something along the lines of a power supply that laptop computers use and will be called Voodoo Volts. [break] Verder een stukje over de geheugen efficiency en bandwidth van de dual en quad VSA 100 boards: [/break] Well, the first issue that comes to mind is of SLI (Scan-Line Interleave). What 3dfx’s goal was with SLI on the Voodoo5 was to achieve the required memory bandwidth to achieve the high fill-rates needed. By using 4 independent chips, the Voodoo5 6000 has each chip deal with Œ the frame-buffer information. Now, the inherit problem with this is that each chip has dedicated memory (32 MB each in the case of the 6000) and each of these must hold the same textures. It is basically redundant texture memory. Now 3dfx is saying that with texture compression (something they are now strongly evangelizing) and with only dealing holding Œ the frame-buffer data, you’ll still be doing well overall. While this is true to some extent, you’re still waiting memory nonetheless. So, if you have to deal with 20 MB of textures, you’re really storing a total of 80 MBs. Really, a considerable waste, though an effective way of improving bandwidth. [break] Tenslotte nog een leuke quote van Scott Sellers / 3dfx: [/break] "AGP texturing is dead."
