Bij Hot Hardware hebben ze eens gebabbeld met Brian Burke P.R. Manager en Peter Wicher, Director of Consumer Product Marketing van 3dfx Interactive. Hieronder de vraag of de Voodoo 4/5 niet gewoon een opgekeeste versie van de Voodoo3 is:
Dave:We've heard a lot about the addition of full 32bit color support, AGP4X and up to 64MB of memory. Is the VSA100 just a souped-up version of the Voodoo3? Can you tell us about the features that are exclusive to any of the next generation products based on the VSA100 and also those only available on the Voodoo5 Multi-Processor boards? People have said that the VSA-100 is just the result of a die shrink and a few new features that where left out of the Voodoo3 in an effort to get it to market in time? Any truth to that?
Peter:
Some VSA-100 features were easy to add to the Voodoo3 base, but others required significant redesign. Things like 32-bit rendering, 64MB memory support, and 4X AGP were not a great challenge. I suppose that we could have shipped this kind of "Voodoo3+" a long time ago but we didn't think that it was compelling for our core customers: we went a lot further. Real SLI is very hard to do, even for the guys who invented it. That's why four years after Voodoo Graphics no one else even has two-way SLI while we're up to 8-way on a single board. FXT1 and DXTC texture compression, combined with full 32-bit texture support and 2K x 2K texture size, was also a non-trivial feature addition and beyond what anyone else in the industry is doing. We also took time to trick out the basic 3D engine. VSA-100 is a full two pixel per clock architecture as opposed to Voodoo3's single pixel per clock, we improved the raster efficiency by about 20%, we increased the texture cache size, we added new texture combines and alpha blends, and we added guardband clipping which significantly offloads the CPU from doing 2D
clip operations to speed up applications.
The SLI boards, that is the Voodoo5 products, enable the full-scene antialiasing (AA) and T-Buffer effects and provide incredible pixel fill rates. Once you've seen a game with full-scene AA you'll never want to go back. Jaggies and scintillating pixels are totally annoying, they suck. One of the beauties of our AA is that it will work with any games now and in the future. Gamers who buy Voodoo5 will get an immediate, huge benefit on their favorite content. The insane fill rates of the SLI boards, like over 1.3 gigapixels on the Voodoo5 6000, will enable high frame rates at serious resolutions: no more knocking the res. down to 640x480 to survive a death match!
.
