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We packed our
gear... Digicam, Notebooks, Laptop, Breath
Spray, Cheeze Wiz, Rolaids... all the stuff that a
good journalist should come prepared with to any
important Tech Conference. We were headed to
the Big Apple, New York City. This was a
"Power Meeting" and we were ready.
We met down town at the Intercontinental.
The guys from 3dfx
travel in style. Marco kept trying to tip
the Doorman but the Cheeze Wiz wasn't going over
too well. Room 623, we knocked on the
door. "Hey man, you got the
stuff?" comes from a gruff voice inside the
room. Stuff? Umm, yeah we've got
"The Wiz" man.... (Marco issues a
firm dope slap upside Dave's head) Uhh,
never mind, wrong room...
OH!! Room 326!!!
(woops) We try another rap on this door and
we are greeted by none other than the 3dfx
PR Supa-Freak, Brian Burke! We step inside
the well appointed Field Tech-Pad of the man
himself. We're offered a libation, some beer
nuts and a comfortable seat. The atmosphere
is cool and relaxed.
After saying hello
and a few minutes of small talk, Brian whips it
out....
We're talking
about the Voodoo 5 - 5500 of course!
(click image for full view)
-
64MB of SDRAM -
- T-Buffer Effects Enabled -
- Motion
Blur, Depth of Field Blur, Soft Shadows and
Reflections -
- 667-733 Megapixel Fill Rate -
- AGP 2X / 4X -
- Full Scene Hardware Supported Anti-Aliasing -
- FXT1 and Direct X Texture Compression -
- 32 Bit Color Rendering, 32 Bit Textures, 2KX2K
Texture Resolution -
- Integrated 350MHz RAMDAC and Hardware DVD Assist
-
Damn,
that looks good doesn't it? OK, it was time to get
serious here. We were gazing upon two
VSA-100 chips and 64MB of High Speed Synch DRAM
ready to rumble on the AGP bus. Take a look
at the extra power connector up in the top right
area of the board. This baby is hungry and
3dfx wanted to make sure it is fed with its own
clean and abundant power source.
The
extra power connector has been frowned upon by a
few people in the hardware community and we just
don't get why they're miffed. Since the
onset of more powerful, more capable graphics
processors, some end users have had problems with
power being supplied to these new boards from the
AGP slot on quite a few motherboards. This
problem WAS NOT caused by the makers of the
graphics boards! It was caused by
motherboard manufactures cutting corners using
cheap voltage regulators versus Switching types
with clean and powerful signals. 3dfx has
taken the question of whether or not your board
can supply enough power out of the equation.
They fixed a major concern with a fairly simple,
VERY cost effective, approach and some people just
aren't seeing it. We tip our hats to 3dfx on
this. One less thing to diagnose.
The
flip side was also a fairly clean design. We
got the impression that we are getting very to
close to release candidate material here.
Without disclosing the
speed of the board we saw (because PT gave us a
"You didn't see that" when clicking
though the driver menus), we can say it's clocked
MUCH higher than the 100mhz boards many saw at
other product showings. Our gut instinct
tells us that the .25 micron, six layer metal
process was a good architecture to work with. It
may not be bleeding edge but it is a
"mature" process and yields will be high
out of the gate. 3dfx still hasn't settled
on a default speed on these VSA-100 powered boards
either. We MAY be looking at V4's and V5's
clocked at a default of 183MHz...but again, no
decision has been made.
One
more thing I would like to add (BigWop
here), when I glanced over to Peter and asked
about overclockability, all I got was a nod and a
smile. :) None of the guys would
officially comment, but the outlook seems
bright. With the 2 pixels per clock that the
VSA-100 is capable of, every 1mhz increment means
a 2 Mpixles/Sec fill rate increase...and every
little bit counts the higher you set your
resolution.
Marco,
set the pick and I dove for the card. Just
then the door flew open and PT Barnum stepped
in. In the event that you haven't heard of
PT or met him before, allow us to inform you that
PT is a rather large gentleman. He stands
about 6' 8" (made the BigWop look like a
little Wop....) I backed down sheepishly and made
some excuse about just wanting to get another
close up shot. "Hi PT! Good to
meet you buddy!" :) (remind us not to mess
with PT) Behind PT came the brains behind
the brawn of 3dfx, Director of Product Marketing,
Peter Wicher. Peter sat us back down and
gave us the "nickel tour" of his new
baby, the Voodoo5.
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