3Dfx has opened the box to reveal it's new Voodoo3 graphics chipset, and if the paper specs hold up, they will have another winner on their hands.

Specs as follows:

• Dual, 32-bit rendering pipelines
• Greater than 7 million triangles per second utilizing its 100-billion operations per second 3D architecture
• More than twice the triangle performance of two Voodoo2's running in SLI format
• The Voodoo3 family will utilize 3Dfx's patented, full-speed, single-cycle, single-pass multi-texturing to enable features such as hardware accelerated bump-mapping and trilinear mip-mapping at 60 frames per second
• A 2D core from Voodoo Banshee
• Integrated RAMDAC at 350MHz
• Maximum resolution/refresh of 2048x1536@75Hz

V3 will be released in two models, the 2000 and Voodoo3 3000. Hmm, sounds like a lesson from the boys at Rendition! The 2000 is aimed at the OEM market while the 3000 is aimed at retail for companies like Diamond and Creative Labs. The 3000 is the hot product, with almost 40% more pushing power than the 2000.

What about 2d? The 2d portion will be similar to Banshee, with a dedicated 128-bit interface and an internal 256-bit data path, though with a higher clock rate then Banshee. Windows 9x GUI will be accelerated at the hardware level which means we ought to notice quite a large boost over the current implementation. Interesting... this is expected to be the only graphics chip able to support 2048x1538 at 75Hz screen refresh. The new board will also have hardware DVD acceleration for 30 frames per second playback.

The 2000 will run with a 300 MHz RAMDAC for high refresh at hi res and a 125mhz core. The "3000" will have a RAMDAC of 350mhz and a 183mhz core. Does this mean that the 3000 will be beyond the .25 micron process or have a built in fan and heatsink? Maybe both. 3dfx may be targetting a .20 micron process, but no one is talking.

In the meantime, 3dfx are aiming to get a 200mhz SGRAM version running soon. The card will be AGP 2X, but without a DME, which means it still uses on-board memory for textures. This is necessary because with the quantity of textured triangles moving through AGP wouldn't be able to provide the data flow.

For a bit of history, let's listen to the recent Voodoo newsletter from Dave Whittle:

"1996- The original Voodoo Graphics ("Voodoo1") pumped out a nice 45 megatexels per second (fill rate). The goal for it was 30 frames per second at 640x480 for most games.

1998- the second-generation Voodoo2 card pumps out 180 megatexels per sec and can do 3 million triangles per second. Its goal is 60 frames per second at 800x600 for most games.

Click to continue . . .

1999- next comes Voodoo3. The high-end retail "3000" version has a fill rate of over 366 megatexels per second. It will be able to handle 7 million triangles per second, and its goal is to play games at 60fps at 1280x1024. We are talking 100 billions of operations per second!

In the demonstration today Bill witnessed Quake2 running on a P2-400 at 1600x1200 on a 19 day old UN-optimized Voodoo3 with a 150mhz core at a VERY playable 31fps (timedemo demo1). That's twice as fast as TNT, and that number will only go up with the finished silicon. The 3D portion is estimated to be around two times faster then the now-ruling Voodoo2 dual-card SLI setup, which is pretty impressive.

Feature-wise, the Voodoo3 looks a lot like Voodoo2. It crams the dual TMUs, Voodoo core AND the VGA core in ONE .25 micron five-metal layer 8.2 million transistor chip! It can do true multitexturing (including TRUE bump-mapping), anti-aliasing (both edge and super sample full scene polygon based), full hardware triangle setup plus all the fog and lighting effects that the Voodoo line is known for. Yes, "strips & fans" too.

It should be compatible with the hundreds of Glide and Direct3D games, but of course we have learned in the past there's a month or two "fudge period" where certain incompatibilities are bound to pop up and are usually fixed quickly. Hopefully I will get a card to test out and let you know my findings as to what is working and what if anything isn't.

So are there any disappointments? The main disadvantage is actually its advantage. To keep compatibility with Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo2 it still has a classic Glide-based Voodoo core. Imagine a Banshee card with a twice-as-powerful V2 SLI setup that can do 3D up to 1600x1200 on one card and you have a good idea what to expect from Voodoo3. It essentially refines and builds on the Voodoo product line.

Great you say? Yes, it will be great... however many people were hoping in a slight change in architecture to allow for 32-bit gaming color depth. Alas, Voodoo3 continues with the 32-bit internal rendering, but still dithers it down to display 16-bit colors. 3Dfx is trying to hype their "texture compression" to bring it up to 22-bit, but it's uncertain if this will catch on for the developers. I hope they can extend the 16meg-memory limitation. I don't know if it's needed, but just in case.... "