Voodoo3

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3dfx Voodoo3 box art
3dfx Voodoo3 box art

Voodoo3 was a series of computer gaming video cards manufactured and designed by 3dfx Interactive. It was the successor to the company's high-end Voodoo 2 line and was based heavily upon the older Voodoo Banshee product. Voodoo3 was announced at COMDEX '98 and arrived on store shelves in 1999.[1] The Voodoo3 line was the first product manufactured by the combined STB Technologies and 3dfx.[2]

Contents

[edit] History

The 'Avenger' graphics core was originally conceived immediately after Banshee. Due to mis-management by 3dfx, this caused the next-generation 'Rampage' project to suffer delays which would prove to be fatal to the entire company.

Avenger was pushed to the forefront as it offered a quicker time to market than the already delayed Rampage. Avenger was no more than the Banshee core with a second texture mapping unit (TMU) added - the same TMU which Banshee lost compared to Voodoo2. Avenger was thus merely a Voodoo2 with an integrated 128-bit 2D video accelerator and twice the clock speed.

[edit] Architecture and performance

3dfx Voodoo3 2000 AGP
3dfx Voodoo3 2000 AGP
3dfx Voodoo3 2000 PCI
3dfx Voodoo3 2000 PCI

Much was made of Voodoo3 (as Avenger was christened) and its 16-bit color rendering limitation. This was in fact quite complex, as Voodoo3 operated to full 32-bit precision (8 bits per channel, 16.7M colours) in its texture mappers and pixel pipeline as opposed to previous products from 3dfx and other vendors, which had only worked in 16-bit precision.

To save framebuffer space, the Voodoo3's rendering output was then dithered to 16 bit, which is fundamentally entirely different to (and much higher quality than) running the whole thing in 16-bit. However, the controversy came about over what happened next.

The Voodoo3's RAMDAC, which took the rendered frame from the framebuffer and generated the display image, performed a 2x2 box or 4x1 line filter on the dithered image to almost reconstruct the original 24-bit color render. 3dfx claimed this to be '22-bit' equivalent quality.[3] The controversy began because most people relied on screenshots to compare image quality, yet Voodoo3's framebuffer (where a screenshot is taken from) is not the final result put on screen. Therefore screenshots did not accurately portray Voodoo3's display quality which was actually much closer to the 24-bit outputs of NVIDIA's RIVA TNT2 and ATI's Rage 128 but far faster. 32-bit color cannot be output to a display as the extra 8 bits are transparency information.

The internal organisation of Avenger was not complex. Pre-setup notably featured a guardband clipper (eventually part of hardware transformation and lighting) but the pixel pipeline was a conventional single-issue, dual-texture design almost identical to that featured on Voodoo2, but capable of working on 32-bit image data as opposed to Voodoo2's pure 16-bit output. Avenger's other remarkable features included the astonishingly high-performance 128-bit GDI accelerator first debuted in Banshee. This 2D engine at least matched the best offerings available, including much more serious parts from Matrox, in benchmarks tests.[4][5] Finally, Avenger's filtering RAMDAC is notable as covered in the previous paragraph. A hack to force it on outside 3D rendering was noted to de-block low bitrate MPEG video.

The Voodoo3 2000, 3000 and 3500 differed mainly in clock frequencies (memory and core were synchronous). The clock rates were 143 MHz, 166 MHz and 183 MHz respectively. This gave the 3000 and 3500 a notable theoretical advantage in multi-textured fillrate over its main rival, the 125 MHz TNT2, but the TNT2 had just under twice the single-textured fillrate of the Voodoo3. While Voodoo3 consisted of one multi-texturing pipeline, the TNT series consisted of twin single texturing pipelines.[6] As a result, Voodoo3 could be at a disadvantage in games not using multiple texturing. The 2000 and 3000 boards generally differed in their support for TV output; the 3500 boards also carried a TV tuner and provided a wide range of video inputs and outputs.

Modern (for the time) multi-texturing games such as Quake3 and Unreal Tournament were almost exclusively Voodoo3 territory. Voodoo3's initial competition was RIVA TNT, and it simply outclassed that chip.[5] NVIDIA's RIVA TNT2 arrived shortly thereafter and the two traded places frequently in benchmark results, fighting for the top (although the Voodoo3's could not support 32-bit rendering like the TNT2 could).[7] The Unreal series, with its particularly potent Glide support, was always a safe haven for Voodoo3 because Glide was much superior to the Direct3D renderer. Eventually once drivers had been refined, Matrox's G400 MAX became more than a match for Voodoo3 and TNT2.[8]

Voodoo3 remained performance competitive throughout its life, eventually being comprehensively outclassed by NVIDIA's GeForce 256 and ATI's Radeon. 3dfx created the ill-fated Voodoo 5 to counter.

[edit] Temperature

The Voodoo3 line of video cards was known to be one of the hottest-running cards of the day. The small passive heatsink onboard each Voodoo3 became hot enough to burn hands when the card was in operation, even simply at the Windows desktop. A user measured the temperature of the heatsink while running the Unreal "fly by" intro and found the temperature to be 72 °C, a 48 °C increase over the 24 °C ambient temperature.[citation needed] One user even had the video card melt part of an IDE cable.[citation needed] The high temperature hasn't any negative effect on stability.

[edit] 3dfx Velocity

3dfx released a line of business / value-oriented cards based on the Voodoo3 Avenger chipset. With the purchase of STB Technologies, 3dfx had acquired several popular brand names. The Velocity brand had appealed to OEM system builders for years, with boards such as the S3 Graphics ViRGE VX-based STB Velocity 3D and NVIDIA RIVA 128-based Velocity 128 being used in many OEM systems from companies such as Gateway. The 3dfx Velocity boards came with only 8 MiB of RAM, compared to 16 MiB on a regular Voodoo3. In addition, one of the texture management units came disabled as well, making the board more like a Banshee. Enthusiasts discovered that it was possible to enable the disabled TMU with a simple registry alteration. The board's clock speed was set at 143 MHz, exactly the same as a Voodoo3 2000.[9]

[edit] Drivers

The last set of drivers officially released for the Voodoo 3 on Win9x was version 1.07.00. For Win2000 the latest version is 1.03.00.[10]

[edit] Competing chipsets

[edit] References

  1. ^ 3Dfx Interactive Blasts COMDEX with Voodoo3 Debut And Four Voodoo Banshee PC-OEM Announcements, 3dfx Press Release, November 16, 1998.
  2. ^ Brown, Peter. 3Dfx Takes Chance on Boards - Voodoo3 2000, Voodoo3 3000, and Voodoo3 3500 - Product Announcement, Electronic News, March 1, 1999.
  3. ^ Beets, Kristof. 3dfx '22Bit Colour' Explored, Beyond3D, May 7, 1999.
  4. ^ Fastsite. Matrox Millennium G400 16MB Review, X-bit Labs, July 2, 1999.
  5. ^ a b Lal Shimpi, Anand. 3dfx Voodoo3, Anandtech, April 3, 1999.
  6. ^ Beyond3D 3D Chip Tables, Beyond3D.Com, accessed August 30, 2006.
  7. ^ Lal Shimpi, Anand. NVIDIA Riva TNT2, Anandtech, April 27, 1999.
  8. ^ Lal Shimpi, Anand. NVIDIA GeForce 256 Part 1: To buy or not to buy, Anandtech, October 11, 1999: p.14.
  9. ^ Andrawes, Mike. 3dfx Velocity 100, Anandtech, October 29, 1999.
  10. ^ [1]


3dfx graphics processors
Voodoo Graphics • Voodoo Rush • Voodoo2 • Voodoo Banshee • Voodoo3 • Velocity • Voodoo 4 • Voodoo 5
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