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These
days technology moves so fast that there is almost
as much of an available market opportunity
supporting older platforms, as there is producing
for the "bleeding edge" market
segment. PCI is an interface that has been
in the PC architecture for years, as well as in
the embedded space. You can also bet your
last buck that it will remain in the PC for many
more years to come. It is only fairly
recently that AGP became the mainstream bus
interface for 2D/3D Graphics cards. There
are still plenty of folks out there with out an
AGP slot. Just think of the many large OEM
motherboard designs that have integrated graphics
on board and you'll soon realize this market
segment is larger than you thought. Now take
into consideration the Macintosh crowd.
Furthermore,
many folks with BX chipset based motherboards have
had a difficult time moving up to the PC133
specification due to the fact that their
motherboard will over-clock the AGP bus far out of
spec, if the Front Side Bus on their board is set
to 133MHz. or higher. This will render most
AGP cards useless in 3D mode and in many cases 2D
as well. So, why not produce a graphics card
based on your latest 2D/3D technology but design
the card to support good ol' PCI? That's
what the folks at 3dfx thought too. So they
bolted 2 VSA100 chips down to a PCI card and here
are the results.
|
| Specifications
of the Voodoo5 5500 PCI |
| Same
hardware, different form factor |
|
Voodoo5
5500 AGP on top and PCI on the bottom (click
image)
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Twin
VSA100 Architecture - Core Clock 166MHz.
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64
MB of 6ns. Synchronous SDRAM
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33MHz.
32bit PCI 2.1 Compatible Bus Interface
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667-733
Megapixels Per Second Fill Rate
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Real-time
Full-Scene HW Anti-Aliasing
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T-Buffer
Digital Cinematic Effect: Motion blur
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T-Buffer
Digital Cinematic Effect: Depth of Field Blur
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T-Buffer
Digital Cinematic Effect: Soft Shadows
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T-Buffer
Digital Cinematic Effect: Soft Reflections
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FXT1
and DirectX® Texture Compression 8-bit
Palletized Textures
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32-bit
Rendering
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32-bit
Textures
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2K
x 2K Textures
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24-bit
Floating Point Depth Buffer (Z or W)
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8-bit
Stencil Buffer
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Fully
integrated 128-bit 2D/3D/Video Accelerator
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350MHz
RAMDAC
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Complete
API support: DirectX, OpenGL, and Glide
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DVD
hardware assist: planar to packed-pixel
conversion
As
you can see from the layout, there is not a lot of
difference between the two cards. There are
a few extra components on the PCI card but they
are mainly for bus interface and power
regulation. Beyond that, this card is all
Voodoo5. In terms of the feature list above,
the clock speed and fill rate remain the same as
well. In addition, although the bus
interface is limited to the bandwidth of PCI,
33MHz. versus 66MHz. with AGP, the V5 5500 PCI has
64MB of memory on board, so it doesn't need to
access system memory across the bus nearly as
often as a 32MB card. This really smoothes
out the frame rate with those gorgeous large
textures.
The
backside - Micron SDRAM and IDT Muxes (click
image)
This
version of the Voodoo5 comes equipped with 6ns.
SDRAM as well, except Micron was the source of the
memory versus the Hyundai SDRAM on the AGP
version. We are not sure if this makes much
of a difference in performance but with respect to
over-clocking, it could very well have
helped. More on this later. Finally,
the bank of IDT "Quick Switch" Muxes (in
the background) are there to help provide that
interface to the PCI bus.
Setup,
Installation, FSAA and LOD
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