by Leonard "Viking1" Hjalmarson

  Tuesday afternoon I had an opportunity to participate in an interview with Dr. Alex Leupp, who joined 3dfx as president and CEO this November. Dr. Leupp is responsible for the development and implementation of the company's market strategy and brings more than 25 years of semiconductor industry experience to 3dfx (he has served as a director on the 3dfx board of directors since October 1998).

Prior to joining 3dfx, Dr. Leupp was president and CEO of Chip Express Corporation, a semiconductor company. Previously, he spent 12 years with Siemens Microelectronics, where he served as president and CEO for six years. Dr. Leupp also holds several U.S. patents on semiconductor design and fabrication.

Oddly, the interviews from other popular gaming sites were asking questions on marketing and business performance, boring stuff for this writer. Instead, I asked some of the questions that were relevant to the consumer - you and I!

I was curious, for example, if the Voodoo 6000 (with four VSA 100 processors and 128 MB of SDRAM on board) would be SLI-able. Of course it would mean that a PCI as well as an AGP version would be available. Unfortunately, there are no plans for such a product.

In fact, this line of products will offer no upgrade path, unlike the Voodoo2 line.

OK, let's back up a moment. Perhaps you aren't aware of exactly what is being offered in the new "Napalm" line that will be launched in February.

The most basic unit will be the V4000, with 32 MB of memory and a single VSA 100 processor (VSA stands for Voodoo Scaleable Architecture). VSA allows multiple VSA-100 chips to act in unison, each drawing parts of a 3D scene and together producing the result many times faster than a single chip could do. Up to 32 processors can act on a single board or on multiple boards to produce one image.

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VSA-100 supports full 32-bit final rendering output, a maximum of 2048x2048 textures, and support for up to 64MB per chip.

The Voodoo4 4000 will run at 166MHz or 183Mhz and will double the pixel fill rate of a Voodoo3 at the same clock rate. Pipelining improvements will bring another another 15-20% improvement in fill rate, and support for FXT-1 texture compressoin and 32-bit rendering will be in place. But sorry, no T-buffer power for the single processor solution.

The Voodoo5 5000 will be available in both PCI and AGP versions. With two VSA-100 processors and 16MB per processor, the 5000 supports a fill-rate of 667-733Mpixels/sec. This board will retail for around$229.

The Voodoo5 5500 will sport the same specs as the 5000 except that it will ship with 64MB of RAM and will only be manufactured for the AGP bus. The top of the line product, the Voodoo5 6000, will push out 1.33Gigapixels per second at 166 MHz, and 1.47Gigapixels per second at 183MHz. This unit will mount four VSA-100 processors, each outfitted with 32MB of RAM for a total of 128MB on board.

This all sounds great, if you can swallow the retail price for this somewhere around $599. But personally, I would be quicker to plunk down my pesos on an eight processor board addressing a total of 128 MB of memory.

At this point 3dfx has no plans for such a product, but maybe someone else like Quantum3D will build it? They have already announced plans for an eight processor AAlchemy board that will sport 256 MB of onboard memory. Their current plans call for this board to be resident in their Heavy Metal GX+ system. It will not be available separately (insert sound of teeth knashing).

With fewer sim developers supporting Glide, not all Napalm features wil be available to sim fans. Neither B17 II nor JANE'S FA18 (at last query) will support Glide. However, some features of the T-buffer, like anti-aliasing, don't need software support and will instantly work on older games when enabled in the driver. Good news for those who buy the next generation of 3dfx part.

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