3dfx - Revision history

Michael Dale: /* Other 3dfx cards */

2022-06-15T12:25:03Z

‎Other 3dfx cards

BrassicGamer: /* External links */ updated the Romero link as the live page has been deprecated. Now points to the archive.org version.

2018-10-05T23:52:26Z

‎External links: updated the Romero link as the live page has been deprecated. Now points to the archive.org version.

Tetrium at 05:40, 6 December 2016

2016-12-06T05:40:51Z

Tetrium at 05:39, 6 December 2016

2016-12-06T05:39:16Z

Michael Dale: /* Voodoo 3 */

2014-06-09T02:29:15Z

‎Voodoo 3

Michael Dale: /* Voodoo 4/5 */

2014-06-09T02:28:16Z

‎Voodoo 4/5

Michael Dale: /* Banshee */

2014-06-09T01:10:33Z

‎Banshee

D1stortion at 20:33, 20 May 2013

2013-05-20T20:33:37Z

D1stortion at 08:27, 20 May 2013

2013-05-20T08:27:59Z

Martin: /* Voodoo 4/5 */

2013-05-19T06:21:31Z

‎Voodoo 4/5

@@ Line 179: / Line 179: @@
 == Other 3dfx cards ==
-[[File:Velocity_8MB_AGP.jpg|200px|thumb||3Dfx Velocity]]
+[[File:3dfx_Velocity_100_AGP.jpeg|200px|thumb||3Dfx Velocity]]
 The company also released other cards, such as the budget Velocity (name taken after the acquisition of STB) line, which only came with 1 TMU similarly to Banshee, although the second one can reportedly be enabled by a registry hack. Also, 3dfx had plans for a Voodoo 5 6000, which would have come with four VSA-100 chips installed and would have been powered by an external power supply, dubbed "Voodoo Volts". About 150-250 of these were made as prototypes. These cards beat Nvidia's GeForce 2 line and are even competitive with GeForce 3 when used with faster CPUs, and are also capable of 8x RGSSAA. The prototypes are considered "legendary" in the enthusiast community and are highly sought after, with prices easily as high as $1000 paid for them.

@@ Line 210: / Line 210: @@
 *[http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=ASCII&prev=_t&sl=de&tl=en&u=http://web.archive.org/web/20070304033237/http://rma.asus.de/support/FAQ/faq034_lx_tntrew.htm List of affected Asus motherboards with modding instructions]
 *[http://www.3dgw.com/faq/moodys_voodoo2_faq.htm Moody's Voodoo2 FAQ]
-*[http://floodyberry.com/carmack/johnc_plan_1998.html#d19980216 John Carmack on texture swapping with Voodoo cards]
+*[https://web.archive.org/web/20140910201631/http://floodyberry.com/carmack/johnc_plan_1998.html#d19980111 John Carmack on texture swapping with Voodoo cards]
 *[http://www.falconfly.de/downloads/Q3_Motion_Blur.zip Q3Test 1.08 for Voodoo 5]
 [[Category:Hardware]]
 [[Category:Graphics Cards]]

@@ Line 198: / Line 198: @@
 == External links ==
 *[http://www.tdfx.de/eng/grafikkarten_alle.shtml Complete database of 3dfx cards]
 *[http://www.falconfly.de/ Best resource for 3dfx drivers + other information]

@@ Line 91: / Line 91: @@
 [[File:3dfx_Voodoo_2.jpg|200px|thumb|Provideo PV830 (reference Voodoo2 with 110MHz rated RAM)]]
 Released in early 1998, the Voodoo2 chipset (SST96) expanded upon its predecessor by adding a second texture processor, featuring 8 or 12 MB EDO DRAM and supporting Direct3D 6. The clock was increased to 90 MHz, almost doubling the performance compared to Voodoo1. Performance in games utilizing the Voodoo2's second texture unit by means of single-pass multitexturing is further increased. The first notable games to do so were GLQuake, Quake II (both 1997) and Unreal (1998). Single-pass trilinear filtering was possible as well.
@@ Line 126: / Line 127: @@
 The Voodoo 3, codenamed "Avenger", was announced at COMDEX in November 1998 and released on April 3, 1999. Following the buyout of STB, 3dfx was now manufacturing their own cards. The Voodoo 3 was basically a higher-clocked Banshee core outfitted with a second texture unit and some bugfixes. The cards were released in four different flavors: the 125 MHz Voodoo 3 1000, the 143 MHz Voodoo 3 2000, the 166 MHz Voodoo 3 3000, and the 183 MHz Voodoo 3 3500 TV with integrated TV tuner. Except for the low-end V3 1000, which could also come with 8 MB, all cards featured 16 MB. The V3 line came both in PCI or AGP versions, with the 3500 being AGP-only. Some PCI versions featured SGRAM instead of the standard SDRAM. Thanks to the integrated 350 MHz RAMDAC (V3 3000/3500), the maximum resolution is 2048x1536 at about 75 Hz.
 Now facing stronger competition from [[NVIDIA|NVIDIA's]] RIVA TNT line, which already supported 32-bit color depth, 1024x1024 textures and AGP texturing, the Voodoo 3 line was somewhat panned by critics and called outdated in terms of features, but was still considered to be very competitive speed-wise, because 32-bit rendering introduced a big performance hit on competitor cards. At that time, 3dfx's marketing was centered around speed, but to demonstrate that the image quality was still better than their last year's high-end setup, they invented the term "22-bit", describing the added 2x2 box filter that masks dithering.[http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/61/1] "3D Filter Quality" in the driver allows to select between the 4x1 linear filter from Voodoo1/2 and the 2x2 box filter.
@@ Line 142: / Line 144: @@
 [[File:3dfx_Voodoo_4_4500_PCI.jpg|200px|thumb||Voodoo 4 4500 PCI]]
 [[File:PowerColor_Voodoo_4_4500.jpg|200px|thumb||PowerColor Evilking IV]]
 [[File:3dfx_Voodoo_5_5500.jpg|200px|thumb||Voodoo 5 5500]]
@@ Line 176: / Line 179: @@
 == Other 3dfx cards ==
 The company also released other cards, such as the budget Velocity (name taken after the acquisition of STB) line, which only came with 1 TMU similarly to Banshee, although the second one can reportedly be enabled by a registry hack. Also, 3dfx had plans for a Voodoo 5 6000, which would have come with four VSA-100 chips installed and would have been powered by an external power supply, dubbed "Voodoo Volts". About 150-250 of these were made as prototypes. These cards beat Nvidia's GeForce 2 line and are even competitive with GeForce 3 when used with faster CPUs, and are also capable of 8x RGSSAA. The prototypes are considered "legendary" in the enthusiast community and are highly sought after, with prices easily as high as $1000 paid for them.

@@ Line 120: / Line 120: @@
 == Voodoo 3 ==
 [[File:3dfx_Voodoo_3_3000.jpg|200px|thumb||Voodoo 3 3000 AGP]]
 [[File:3dfx_Voodoo_3_3500.jpg|200px|thumb||Voodoo 3 3500 TV]]

← Older revision		Revision as of 01:10, 9 June 2014
Line 107:		Line 107:

	== Banshee ==		== Banshee ==
		+
		+	[[File:Quantum3D_Raven_PCI.JPG\|200px\|thumb\|Quantum3D Raven PCI (16MB Banshee)]]

	Released in 1998, the Banshee was 3dfx's first fully integrated 2D+3D card. It combines a new 2D core, a single-TMU Voodoo2 and a 250 MHz RAMDAC into one chip. It is clocked at 100 MHz, meaning that the midrange Banshee was actually slightly faster in then prevalent single-textured games than the high-end Voodoo2, yet clearly falls behind in games utilizing multi-texturing. Banshee cards were the first 3dfx cards to universally feature some kind of cooling solution and came equipped with 8MB/16MB SDRAM or SGRAM, with PCI and AGP versions existent.		Released in 1998, the Banshee was 3dfx's first fully integrated 2D+3D card. It combines a new 2D core, a single-TMU Voodoo2 and a 250 MHz RAMDAC into one chip. It is clocked at 100 MHz, meaning that the midrange Banshee was actually slightly faster in then prevalent single-textured games than the high-end Voodoo2, yet clearly falls behind in games utilizing multi-texturing. Banshee cards were the first 3dfx cards to universally feature some kind of cooling solution and came equipped with 8MB/16MB SDRAM or SGRAM, with PCI and AGP versions existent.

@@ Line 50: / Line 50: @@
 SET SST_VOUT_CLKDEL=0x0
 SET SST_TMUMEM_SIZE=2</pre>
 == Voodoo Graphics ==

@@ Line 27: / Line 27: @@
 A method to improve texture quality with Voodoo cards is setting a negative LOD bias in the driver settings, resulting in a sharper image. However, this causes a slight performance hit and leads to very noticeable texture shimmering. The function is essentially only usable with FSAA on VSA-100 cards due to this.[http://www.anandtech.com/show/580/22][http://quake3tweaks.tripod.com/lod_nn4.html]
-All 3dfx cards share the fact that the graphics core and memory always run at the same frequency. This makes overclocking generally harder than on other cards, because in many cases the memory will hit the limit earlier than the core. Still it is possible: V1/V2 cards can be overclocked by environment variables, while the other cards contain an option in the driver for this. With most drivers this needs to be unlocked with a [http://www.falconfly.de/downloads/overclock.zip special utility from 3dfx], which will also allow the user to set VSync options for both DirectX and OpenGL. Better cooling, e.g. through means of a case fan is advised when overclocking.
+All 3dfx cards besides Banshee share the fact that the graphics core and memory always run at the same frequency. This makes overclocking generally harder than on other cards, because in many cases the memory will hit the limit earlier than the core. Still it is possible: V1/V2 cards can be overclocked by environment variables, while the other cards contain an option in the driver for this. With most drivers this needs to be unlocked with a [http://www.falconfly.de/downloads/overclock.zip special utility from 3dfx], which will also allow the user to set VSync options for both DirectX and OpenGL. Better cooling, e.g. through means of a case fan is advised when overclocking.
 Note that 3dfx cards can react quite sensitively to overclocked system buses, such as the commonly attempted 133 MHz FSB on 100 MHz-specified Intel 440BX chipset boards. Such an overclock on these boards will result in a 89 MHz (instead of 66 MHz) frequency for the AGP bus due to the lack of a proper divider, which can result in garbled BIOS screens and IDE drive corruption. Finally, note that all overclocking happens at the user's own risk.
@@ Line 106: / Line 106: @@
 == Banshee ==
-Released in 1998, the Banshee was 3dfx's first fully integrated 2D+3D card. It combines a new 2D core, a single-TMU Voodoo2 and the RAMDAC into one chip. It is clocked at 100 MHz, meaning that the midrange Banshee was actually slightly faster in then prevalent single-textured games than the high-end Voodoo2, yet clearly falls behind in games utilizing multi-texturing. Banshee cards were the first 3dfx cards to universally feature some kind of cooling solution and came equipped with 8MB/16MB SDRAM or SGRAM, with PCI and AGP versions existent.
+Released in 1998, the Banshee was 3dfx's first fully integrated 2D+3D card. It combines a new 2D core, a single-TMU Voodoo2 and a 250 MHz RAMDAC into one chip. It is clocked at 100 MHz, meaning that the midrange Banshee was actually slightly faster in then prevalent single-textured games than the high-end Voodoo2, yet clearly falls behind in games utilizing multi-texturing. Banshee cards were the first 3dfx cards to universally feature some kind of cooling solution and came equipped with 8MB/16MB SDRAM or SGRAM, with PCI and AGP versions existent.
 Its 2D acceleration was very capable. It rivaled the fastest 2D cores from Matrox, Nvidia, and ATI, consisting of a 128-bit GUI engine and a 128-bit VESA VBE 3.0 VGA core. DirectDraw is accelerated, and the GUI portion supports all of the Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI) in hardware. The GUI engine achieved near-theoretical maximum performance with a null driver test in Windows NT.
 '''Bottom line:''' Banshee cards are far superior to Voodoo Rush, although they have a few bugs in various areas such as video playback and DOS VESA modes. As such they are not ideal gaming choices, although they can be still useful for some games.
@@ Line 119: / Line 121: @@
 The Voodoo 3, codenamed "Avenger", was announced at COMDEX in November 1998 and released on April 3, 1999. Following the buyout of STB, 3dfx was now manufacturing their own cards. The Voodoo 3 was basically a higher-clocked Banshee core outfitted with a second texture unit and some bugfixes. The cards were released in four different flavors: the 125 MHz Voodoo 3 1000, the 143 MHz Voodoo 3 2000, the 166 MHz Voodoo 3 3000, and the 183 MHz Voodoo 3 3500 TV with integrated TV tuner. Except for the low-end V3 1000, which could also come with 8 MB, all cards featured 16 MB. The V3 line came both in PCI or AGP versions, with the 3500 being AGP-only. Some PCI versions featured SGRAM instead of the standard SDRAM. Thanks to the integrated 350 MHz RAMDAC (V3 3000/3500), the maximum resolution is 2048x1536 at about 75 Hz.
-Now facing stronger competition from [[NVIDIA|NVIDIA's]] RIVA TNT line, which already supported 32-bit color depth, 1024x1024 textures and AGP texturing, the Voodoo 3 line was somewhat panned by critics and called outdated in terms of features, but was still considered to be very competitive speed-wise, because 32-bit rendering introduced a big performance hit on competitor cards. At that time, 3dfx's marketing was centered around speed, but to demonstrate that the image quality was still better than their last year's high-end setup, they invented the term "22-bit", describing the fact that the RAMDAC of the card would perform either a 2x2 box or 4x1 line filter on the image, depending on the driver settings, masking some of the dithering.[http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/61/1]
+Now facing stronger competition from [[NVIDIA|NVIDIA's]] RIVA TNT line, which already supported 32-bit color depth, 1024x1024 textures and AGP texturing, the Voodoo 3 line was somewhat panned by critics and called outdated in terms of features, but was still considered to be very competitive speed-wise, because 32-bit rendering introduced a big performance hit on competitor cards. At that time, 3dfx's marketing was centered around speed, but to demonstrate that the image quality was still better than their last year's high-end setup, they invented the term "22-bit", describing the added 2x2 box filter that masks dithering.[http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/61/1] "3D Filter Quality" in the driver allows to select between the 4x1 linear filter from Voodoo1/2 and the 2x2 box filter.
 Its prime competitor was the NVIDIA RIVA TNT2, of which the TNT2 Ultra was widely considered to be the better choice overall by reviewers, mainly due to superior Direct3D performance and more features. Still, arguably 2048x2048 textures and 32-bit rendering were not as significant in 1999 as the better game compatibility of the Voodoo 3. Other competitor cards included the ATI Rage 128 Pro and S3 Savage 4.
@@ Line 140: / Line 142: @@
 Voodoo 4 4500 cards have 32 MB SDRAM. Voodoo 5 5500 cards have 64 MB SDRAM, although only 32 of it are actually usable due to the SLI method used, much like with Voodoo2 SLI. Voodoo 5 cards require supplementary power in the form of a single Molex connection.
-The marketing was now more centered on image quality ("cinematic effects") than speed: Through the added "T-buffer" the Voodoo 4 4500 is capable of 2x RGSSAA (rotated-grid supersampling anti-aliasing), while the Voodoo 5 5500 supports up to 4x RGSSAA.[http://www.anandtech.com/show/350/2][http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/37/1] Compared to other methods such as MSAA (multisample anti-aliasing), this variant is considered higher quality, because it smooths the whole screen and eliminates texture flickering to a great extent, therefore generating a much "calmer" and more realistic image especially when moving in the game.
+The marketing was now more centered on image quality ("cinematic effects") than speed: Through the added "T-buffer" the Voodoo 4 4500 is capable of 2x RGSSAA (rotated-grid supersampling anti-aliasing), while the Voodoo 5 5500 supports up to 4x RGSSAA.[http://www.anandtech.com/show/350/2][http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/37/1] Compared to other methods such as MSAA (multisample anti-aliasing), this variant is considered higher quality, because it smooths the whole screen and eliminates texture flickering to a great extent, therefore generating a much "calmer" and more realistic image especially when moving in the game. Turning on 4xFSAA will automatically disable the post filter that is used in 16-bit mode (as will playing in 32-bit color depth).[http://www.techspot.com/reviews/hardware/voodoo5_part2/voodoo5-2.shtml]
 Unfortunately this comes with a large performance impact due to the high fillrate requirements from rendering at a higher resolution and sampling down to the actual resolution. Additionally, it has the weakness of blurring the text and UI in games; this undesired effect seems to be more detrimental with the 2x mode than the 4x mode. Generally speaking, the 4x mode is only practially useful up to 800x600 depending on the game.

@@ Line 153: / Line 153: @@
 The game is then supposed to confirm T-buffer usage in the console when starting it up. Other valid values for the second command are 2 and 8, depending on the number of VSA-100 chips on the used card. The FSAA implementation in this game is reported to be faster than in other releases. Still, given the experimental nature it is very unlikely that the DoF effects work as intended.
-The Voodoo 5 generally performs similarly to the GeForce 256 DDR, but was not competitive with high-end GeForce 2 cards, especially since Glide support in new games was rapidly declining by that time. Likewise, the delayed Voodoo 4 4500 was considered obsolete by reviewers upon its introduction due to the GeForce 2 MX performing better at a similar price point. Despite this, reviewers pointed out that the VSA-100's SSAA implementation was superior to the competition.
+The Voodoo 5 generally performs similarly to the GeForce 256 DDR, but was not competitive with high-end GeForce 2 cards, especially since Glide support in new games was rapidly declining by that time. Likewise, the delayed Voodoo 4 4500 was considered obsolete by reviewers upon its introduction due to the GeForce 2 MX performing better at a similar price point (the Voodoo 4 4500 was released almost four months after the Voodoo 5 5500). Despite this, reviewers pointed out that the VSA-100's SSAA implementation was superior to the competition.
 Unlike the GeForce cards which were Direct3D 7 capable, the VSA-100 line was still limited to Direct3D 6, as it lacked Hardware T&L. This feature, which was introduced by Nvidia a year before, was slowly taking off in 2000 and games which use it to a great extent are not optimally suited for 3dfx hardware. After 3dfx came to an end, fanmade drivers tried to solve this problem and make some 2001 and later games playable on these cards.