Let's just talk about it. Share knowledge of what could have been. Also, if anyone wants to bring up other could-have-been-but-weren't products from 3Dfx, feel free. :bigsmile:
I don't know about that. It would have been released on the same time as the Geforce 3, which was faster, had pixel shaders, lesser power requirements and was smaller, while the voodoo didn't even have Hardware T&L..
i dunno about that...thats cuz they had 3dfx Glide..which was much faster.... I had a voodoo5 5500 AGP 8x and the thing flew. It was much faster than my friends G2. I had that voodoo5 in a P3 1ghz at the time of its peak. I loved that machine... Many good times with the original Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, Heretic 2, American McGees Alice (fun game, and still is) etc.
Here some interesting benches: http://www.x86-secret.com/articles/divers/v5-6000/v56kgb-7.htm http://www.sudhian.com/index.php?/articles/show/413
Whoa whoa whoa, the V5 6000 would have blown anything out of the water in Glide, yes, but the question is... do we use glide today? If 3Dfx was alive today, what would the industry have leaned towards?
Re Is known that they prepare GLIDE to be open sourced. So I think this could be good in fight towards direct x and also for developers. I owned V56k for some years and was very good card and also power consumption wasn't so big. I have AGP Daytona with VSA-101 and this card could compete in low-end very good against GF4-MX. I run at 166MHz at default and I run this baby on 204MHz flawlessly, more frequency wasn't possible because the DDR1 chips was the limit. But I know from former 3dfx enginner (creator of Daytona card) that they run this card in lab on 270MHz with proper DDR1 chips.
The Voodoo 5 didn't even support Hardware T&L.....at the time it would have come out, none of the big games supported Glide so it would have lost out to the GF and Radeon series in all the huge titles like (at the time) Battlefield 1942 and Medal of Honor Allied Assault. Voodoo cards were great, when Glide was supported.....but without hardware T&L, I don't think the Voodoo 5 would ever have been as good a product as its earlier predecessors. Plus it was an absolutely monster of a card, biggest agp card ever? It's about 160% the size of a Geforce or FX series card, with multiple fans!
Re GeforceFX wasn't competitor to V56k, it was GF2. And For GF3 there was project Rampage. And I'm not sure it T/L in games in these days had a great boost in performance. I played Giants which supports T/L on V56k and GF2 Pro with similar FPS. So T/L in this time was only for 3Dmark which impact score for card automatically when there was no support for that. T/L unit in GF2 wasn't so strong,so non-T/L card could compete in triangle output if it will be with fast CPU. But you right. open sourcing of GLIDE was late and majority of new games was OGL or DX engines but as you know in engines like UT2k3 and later depends rendering platform on renderer which could be easily worked for GLIDE if GLIDE will be supporting shaders. Also 3dfx wants to focused on OpenGL primarily after open sourcing GLIDE because GLIDE and OGL have many thing common.
Just to point out, I was just referring to the size of the cards when I mentioned how big it was, not that is was competing with the FX cards....just to clarify that!
The FX line isn't the largest. I do believe the 8800GTX's are now the largest and the 7800GTX 512MB is coming in close behind that.
Everything what I know about Rampage I know from former 3dfx engineer. I had this baby in my hands. Only 3 prototype boards was made before 3dfx asset was sold to nVidia. Technology: 2D / Video: 128 bit graphic core HW acceleration DVD (Motion Compensation, Planar to packed pixel conversion) 640*480 / 160Hz; 1600*1200 / 100Hz; (2048*1536 / 85 Hz ?) 3D: 52 bit internal precision rendering (13bit per each RGBA component) 32 bit color output 32 bit color textures support 24 bit FP Z-Buffer 8 bit Stencil Buffer Textures Resolution up-to 2048x2048 Texture Compression DXT, FXT Single-Pass Bilinear / Trilinear texture filtering Anisotropic Filtering (16x max. ~ 128tap) Single-Pass & Single Cycle Multi Texturing Single-Pass & Single Cycle Bump Mapping Alpha Blending Pixel Shader 1.1 Line / Edge AntiAliasing Full-Scene AntiAliasing: MultiSampling (4x per Rampage, 800 MSamples/s) Full-Scene AntiAliasing: Rotated-Grid Super Sampling Flat / Gourard Shading LOD MipMapping Sub-Pixel & Sub-Texel Correction Programmable Fog Effects T-Buffer (all effects from VSA-100) M-Buffer (for Multi Sample-AntiAliasing) HW supported HSR SAGE: 25 HW lights Vertex Shader Options: AGP-4 64MB DDR per chip passive cooling do 200 MHz API, rendering: MS Direct 3D over 8.0 spec. 3Dfx Glide SGI OpenGL Also there are alpha drivers on which Rampage can run in 2D in W2k. Source code for them is also available but no one worked on them to run more 3D features. A week before 3dfx went out of business there was Rampage successfully running Quake3 in lab on experimental OpenGL ICD. They had this card almost ready and this card would be on market as first card which support pixel shaders a year before GF3 launch!!! but is only IF....
Again, that wasn't my point. I was just generally speaking about cards in and around the same time as the Voodoo 5 that alot of people would have had. (I know an fx5200 came out long, long time afterwards but its a very common card for comparison purposes.)
Although I was a huge 3dfx fan back in the day, I think the V5 6000 would not have boded well. After the V5 5500, I believe the company needed to depart from the VSA-100 chipset design and go next generation with a faster, higher frame rate producing chipset. Granted, the glide API produced higher fps in games that supported so, but for the then and future, the RivaTNT 2 and subsequent Geforce line of cards were overall faster and had hardware T&L. Not to mention the V5 6000 was freakin huge, and a power hog as well. I would have had to buy a separate generator to keep that thing juiced up
What were the power requirements, actually, if anyone knows? Which Voodoo card has the external power unit, or was that merely a planned unit that never made it? I can't remember...
I'd believe it! I don't quite think it could do 25HW lights... but never the less... Tell me about the Brazos.
Yes, it could do 25HW lights,but with vertex unit called SAGE,Scalable Architecture Geometry Engine, geometric coprocessor, řadič, programmable T&L processor. It can create 50 million polygons per sec. GeForce 256 - 15 million polygons per sec. GeForce 2 - 25 million polygons per sec. Radeon - 30 million polygons per sec.