• 3dfx Voodoo2
• Matrox MGA G200
• No.9 Revolution IV
• Riva128
• Riva TNT
• S3 Savage3D

The 3d revolution continues at breakneck speed, adding to our interest, and sometimes to our confusion! What is really happening with 3d hardware? Will Voodoo2 still be the reigning king this fall? Is there a future to 3dfx proprietary Glide API? (An API is the software interface that allows the hardware to communicate with your game. 3dfx developed their own interface for their Voodoo chipset, but V2 is also Direct3d compatible).

Only a short time ago all the 3D rendering was being done by the software/application. All the terrain, objects and effects we saw were being computed, processed, and delivered via the CPU to the video card. As a result, the overworked CPU had little left to give to the application, and our frame rates and graphics detail and effects were greatly limited.

But with the advent of 3D accelerators, polygons could be drawn using only the polygon's 3-dimensional vertices - and from that, textures could be mapped on those polygons. Better yet, in addition to general acceleration, special features could now be considered that would have brought any CPU to its knees. Shading, anti-aliasing, fogging, dithering, alpha-blending, filtering and mip-mapping have been developed and improved to the point where new graphics engines can imitate real life environments.

The 3D accelerator goes beyond the 2-dimensional world by calculating the hidden element; the z-axis. If you look at your monitor, the up-and-down direction could be called the X-axis. The left-and-right direction could be called the Y-axis. The Z-axis actually goes into the monitor (we call it "depth"). By utilizing a 3D accelerator in your computer, applications (such as Flight Simulators) offload the majority of the 3D rendering to the video card and create scenes that exist in three dimensions.

They're At the Post!

The winning horses to date have been developed by Rendition, 3dfx, nVidia, ATI, and Intel. The currently reigning champ is 3dfx with its recent second generation chipset called "Voodoo 2." This chipset, which actually uses three processors on a single board, is being used by at least seven different manufacturers to procude video cards .

The video scene is extremely volatile, however, since its on the cutting edge of the gaming hardware market, which in turn drives the software market. Some new horses and some old ones are about to run a new race. An old player, Matrox, is about to step back into the field with the MGA G200 chip. An also-ran, S3, is similarly set to launch a hot new chip. Good old Number Nine, almost invisible in the 3d gaming hardware market, has just announced their Revolution IV. And nVidia, who have done extremely well with their Riva128 chipset, are at the gate and chomping at the bit with their second generation TNT chip.

This race is different than a horse race, however. While speed may be the paramount factor for serious gamers, image quality is also a consideration. nVidia took it on the nose with the Riva128, which had only mediocre image quality. 3dfx likewise was a bit weak in this department. But now that speed is adequate chipmakers have been bumping up resolution and image quality.

The reigning champ, Voodoo2, is only capable of 1024x768. But these new horses are far more finely detailed, running up to 1600x1200 under DX5 and DX6. With memory prices falling drastically this past year and chip production technology advancing, the new race will be judged not only on speed, but also on quality. We want the fastest horses, but also the best looking. After all, coming sims like Flanker 2.0, F16 Viper and MiG29 Fulcrum, Fighter Duel 2.0, Fighter Squadron, F4, EAW, WWII Fighters and others will operate to the limits of our video boards. With this background in mind, lets kick the tires... er, look at some teeth!

Matrox MGA G200

With the arrival of the G200 in 8 meg and 16 meg incarnations, Matrox appears poised to re-enter the 3d marketplace in a big way this year. Matrox will release two AGP boards based on this chip: a new Millenium and a new Mystique, the main difference between the two being slightly faster memory on the Millenium and a higher frequency DAC for higher refresh rates at high resolutions.

According to raw specs the G200 is about 15% weaker than the Voodoo2 but compensates for this in picture quality, 2D/3D integration, and price. The G200, like the other new horses this year, processes images in 32-bit color for the best possible quality. There aren't any sims that can run at that color depth yet, but they probably won't be long in coming.

As for APIs, Matrox plans to have drivers for OpenGL ready for the July ship date. Feature-wise, the card offers a 128-bit DualBus architecture which is composed of two 64-bit buses working in parallel. With 8 megs standard, the G200 boards can run up to 1600x1200 in 16 bit color.

Falcon 4.0 is spectacular at 1152x864, and on the Mystique G200 I've had it as high as 1600x1280. Watch for a complete hands on report on the new Mystique next week.

Click to continue . . .

Number Nine Revolution IV

The Revolution IV is based upon Number Nine’s recently announced fourth-generation, 128-bit graphics chip, Ticket To Ride IV™, and will feature a standard 16-megabytes of dedicated video memory. Applications and games can also utilize the extra graphics memory to support triple-buffering for smoother animation. The estimated street price of under $169.00 sounds too good to be true!

The standard 16-megabyte SDRAM configuration will offer resolution support up to 1920 x 1200 to 77 Hz. The 128-bit design is utilized throughout the chip and across all functional areas of the board, and a 250 megahertz (MHz) Digital-Analog Converter (DAC) is fed by dual 128-bit wide video pipes (all other current SDRAM graphics technologies transfer data to memory over a 32- or 64-bit memory bus).

The Revolution IV supports Direct3D™ and OpenGL® 3D acceleration The processor itself features an advanced Display List Processor engine (DLP). This DLP engine allows the host to batch individual drawing commands, normally sent to the board one at a time (serial transmission). The extra large on-chip memory cache allows multiple command lists to be sent to the board in bursts, effectively allowing the graphics processor and host to run in parallel.

A pre-production Revolution IV running 3D WinBench 98 scored over 950 3D WinMarks on a Pentium® II 400 MHz computer at the highest possible 3D image quality. Under Windows NT 4.0 and Number Nine’s own OpenGL ICD (Installable Client Driver), the Revolution IV scored a 46 when running the Viewperf CDRS-03 OpenGL 3D benchmark (when tested at a resolution of 1024 x 768 at 65K colors). The Revolution IV also scored over 257 High-End Graphics WinMarks under Windows ’95 at a resolution of 1280 x 1024 x 65K colors.

S3 Savage 3D

S3's Virge chip was under-whelming, labelled by some as a 3d decelerator. But their new chip is making an entirely new entry into the hardware gaming market. The Savage3D will support a maximum memory configuration of 8MB of SDRAM or SGRAM. STB will release their "Nitro 3200" based on this chip, and Hercules has announced their "Thriller 3D" in both PCI and AGP versions.

Like the Revolution IV, a 128-bit graphics engine powers the chip, with an integrated 250-MHz RAMDAC supporting resolutions up to 1,600 by 1,200 in 32-bit color. TV-out is integrated into the chip, offering simultaneous TV/monitor display without the use of a video encoder.

Early tests of this new chip in gaming applications place it anywhere from 15-25% faster than Voodoo2 under Direct3d, with very early drivers of course. The 128-bit chip achieves 125 million pixels per second through its single cycle trilinear architecture.

The Savage3D delivers more than 4X AGP performance through a new AGP engine and Microsoft-endorsed texture compression technology. By compressing data up to 1/6 the normally required space, S3TC enables Savage3D to deliver 4X AGP performance and essentially doubles the chip's frame buffer size by allowing more textures to be stored.

Hardware Speculation

Riva TNT

The new Riva TNT chip produces 250 million pixels/sec fill rate (2.5X Riva 128). I have no test data on this chip, and so am relying on a recent Gamecenter report. Design specs for the TNT are similar to the No.9 Revolution IV except that the floating point processor on the TNT is almost twice as powerful as that on the Revolution IV.

Gamecenters testing put the TNT about 25% slower than the Savage3D. However, the designers state that they expect the chip to be as much as 25% faster in its final version with faster memory technology and optimized drivers. This would place it on par with the Savage3D, although simulation applications may vary from the results with Gamecenters primary test beds of Incoming and Turok.

Conclusion

The fall of 1998 will end our speculation on both the Riva TNT as well as the Revolution IV. My guess is that the Savage3D, TNT and Revolution IV will be vying for king of the hill (except under Glide).

If you use V2 as your primary accelerator you must invest in two expensive video boards for solid system performance, and you will still be limited to 1024x768 at 16 bits as your maximum resolution. Even if the performance of V2 under DX6 is slightly better than the best performance of one of the new single board solutions, it calls into question the viability of building a system around Voodoo2 for the best price/performance matrix.

Whatever the outcome of the race this fall, gamers can look forward to higher frame rates, better image quality, and more realistic gaming environments!

Addendum

More recent testing by other reporters place the Savage3d slower than anticipated, as is the Riva TNT. However, the TNT drivers were still quite early. At the same time, Voodoo Banshee (their 2d/3d solution) is looking better than anticipated, placing 10-15% faster than a single V2 board! Good news!

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