Looking for information on Voodoo2 products, we swung by a few 3dfx vendors, including Diamond and Canopus. Diamond had a demo of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter going on a Voodoo2 machine, but it was difficult to tell how much better it was running. There wasn't a framerate counter, and Turok already ran pretty well on Voodoo1 anyhow. We would have to head to the 3dfx booth to get the real skinny. In the meantime, the rep announced a release date as February and a price point between USD $200 and $300. Diamond looks set to get the jump on the competition releasing a Voodoo2 product.

At Canopus, the atmosphere and attitude was very different. Canopus is looking into releasing a Voodoo2 card sometime around March to April, but had no prototype cards ready for the show. However, we had an interesting conversation with the president of the company, Hiroshi Yamada. Mr. Yamada realizes that the way his company sells their product in the US they can only attract a niche market. He asked many questions, and expressed a very sincere interest in learning what kind of 3d card features do hardcore gamers want.

To ensure the interest of the serious gamer, Canopus have adopted the philosophy of making sure that their product will always offer some kind of technological advantage to offset the higher price point and limited distribution methods. We have already seen this in the Pure 3d with its extra texture memory, overclocking friendly design, and its extra TV/S-Video outputs. In fact, Mr. Yamada openly reccomended that Pure 3d owners acquire fans for their cards so they can safely overclock them to 60Mhz! Not exactly the kind of thing one expects to hear from a company president. Canopus is looking into building an inexpensive fan for Pure3d owners if they can get a quality mechanism and have it fit the card snugly, as well. So while Canopus will launch their Voodoo2 product some time after the competition, their card should be a very strong contender.

So what's the news at 3dfx itself? We spent a considerable amount of time at the 3dfx booth with Brian Bruning to try to bring back the most complete picture of what the new baby at 3dfx can do. The good news is that the hype you've probably been hearing is basically true. Using Glide applications, the Voodoo 2 is a screamer beyond compare. A strong variety of games were on display with the technology, including Half-Life, Riot, Incoming, Quake 2, Need for Speed 2 SE, and Longbow 2.

The driving game, Need for Speed 2, has been panned for having a sluggish frame rate and poor control response in some cases. Running on the Voodoo 2, it is almost an entirely new game - even comparable against Sega's mega-expensive SuperGT arcade racer. The game runs unbelievably smooth - at least 30 fps, possibly much more - and that is running at 1024x768, and including some impressive environment mapping effects to make the cars look shiny.

Remember that that kind of resolution increase means that the card has to be at least FOUR times faster just to maintain performance equivalent to Voodoo1. Clearly the Voodoo 2 has the power to spare. Playing games at such incredible resolution levels is a sight to behold. Everything now looks workstation-class. You can just imagine $50,000 graphics workstations all over the world beginning to sweat profusely.

The new board has some interesting features: Detail texturing, improved mip-mapping, improved lighting effects, improved environment mapping, triangle hardware setup, dual texture processors, and now instead of 50 or 57 Mhz that the Voodoo1 runs at, the Voodoo 2 now handles 90 Mhz! (Ed. See also our 3d Page).

The Detail Texturing and improved mip-mapping allow the Voodoo2 to carefully scale the details in the textures used between very basic from far away and extremely complex up close. This will have a positive effect on alleviating the "out-of-focus" look that anti-aliased games can get with low-res textures, and without large texture memory penalties.

The new lighting effects are difficult to describe, exactly, because we only were shown them in the context of one demo. They have two basic results, though - the illumination of various objects is even more flexible and realistic looking than before, and objects can have a very glossy sheen that reflects the lighting of the environment effectively.

The Voodoo 2 can paint stuff on the screen fast. Wicked fast. However, supporting this incredible drawing speed requires quite a lot of complex 3d calculations. The computer can only handle a limited number of these computations at a time, though. This creates a new source of bottlenecking in the graphics engine. Fill rate is very important, but polygon counts are now becoming extremely important as well. After all, we don't just want things to paint faster on the screen, we also want them to have a more realistic, detailed shape, and we want to be able to have lots of them without having the frame rate drop.

Voodoo 2 addresses this problem by incorporating a hardware-based ntriangle setup engine. This is a special-purpose "3d-coprocessor" of sorts that takes much of the math load off of the CPU, allowing for more polygons and it frees up CPU cycles that can be spent on more appropriate things, like AI routines. The bad news, as I had mentioned in an earlier newsgroup post, is that Microsoft doesn't seem to be interesting in supporting such features in Direct 3D, and that it had appeared that the only way to use such cool features was with Glide.

3dfx is very resourceful, however, and as it turns out, they will be building the Direct 3d support for the triangle setup processor into their own Direct3d driver. Unfortunately, this doesn't alleviate the fact that Direct 3d still has a tremendous amount of inefficiencies, making a Glide version of a game far preferable to a Direct 3d version, especially on a Voodoo2.

The last feature is probably the one you've heard the most about, and that's the Scan Line Interleaving interface. This allows 2 Voodoo 2 boards to operate at double the fill-rate of a single board, and it allows them to pool their framebuffer sizes to allow higher resolutions and/or speeds than possible with only one card. Since each card is purchased separately, this is a very intriguing upgrade path for serious gamers. Just slap on a second one when the first gets a little old, or when your bank account recovers. That's an affordable upgrade path.

This is all well and good, but you're probably wondering how this is going to affect your favorite sims, right? Voodoo 2 goes a long way in this regard. I had the opportunity to play Longbow 2 on a single-card PCI system. The computer itself is a P2-266. With all the details set to the highest possible settings, the game ran totally smooth. At one point, when I accidentally hit the wrong key on the foreign keyboard, it took me a moment to notice that I was still in the virtual cockpit and not the bitmapped version - that's how smooth it was going. Longbow 2 might be one of the first graphically intense simulations in a long time where some users might actually have enough equipment to max out the game and have speed to spare within three months of its release. (Ed. Note: F22: ADF and TAW will also benefit from this extra horsepower!)

Faster frame rates are important too, but finding out what can the card *really* do is important in getting an idea of what kind of games can we expect to see in the future. To get us these answers, Brian ran a demo designed around the new hardware that takes advantage of its new features. The results were so unbelievable that for a little while we were convinced that there was something suspicious going on. The demo they displayed was a an arcade shooter technology demonstrator tentatively called "Shot". It takes place underwater, and naturally bears a passing resemblance to the Microsoft shooting game "Deadly Tide."

But where Deadly Tide was rendered with computers crunching numbers for weeks, Shot was running on an SLI dual-Voodoo2 system in 30+ frames per second! The graphics bordered on being photo-realistic at times. Rather than looking like the typical "ink-and-paint" cartoony polygon models, many objects were rendered so finely that they looked like they were sculpted out of plastic or other material. It's only natural that the next generation of 3d rendering hardware would reach this next level eventually, but it was shocking to realize just how close it is.

Assuming it doesn't lose much efficiency in the translation to OpenGL, a pair of SLI Voodoo2 cards should definitely be able to deliver the kind of quality imaging you can see in the demo AVIs available of Su-27 2.0. It will probably be a little while before we see many games that use these extra graphics detail features, but in the meantime, it's likely that lucky Voodoo2 owners will be spending a lot of time with maxxed out detail settings in Glide games next year.

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