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Go to Reviews: 3d Boards
As every serious sim fan knows, new software is proving too demanding for our hardware. About two years ago some of the principles used for accelerators on 3d workstations found their way into the PC marketplace, and the world has changed forever! Finally we have a way to deal with depth, high object detail and special effects (fog and transparency, reflections, dynamic lighting, etc.) while increasing the frame rates to playable levels. The beauty of the accelerator solution is that we can attain high frame rates while freeing the CPU for other tasks: calculating the figures needed to maintain a dynamic battlefield, adding real wind and weather effects, increasing the accuracy of the flight model, and extending the physics modelling to damage effects, weapons, and even secondary damage effects. Initially only two accelerators met the challenge: the Verite R1000 by Rendition and the Voodoo chipset made by 3dfx. Shortly afterwards nVidia entered the picture with its Riva chipst, and then new releases from ATI and others expanded the picture significantly. The 3d wars have only really begun! ATI has released their Rage Pro chip, which has built in support for DVD and for Intels Accelerated Graphics Port. There are two boards based on the new chipset, the XPERT@Play and XPERT@Work. The former board is maximized for gamers and runs close to the speed of the original Voodoo chipset but with more features. For example, the XPERT@Play will do 16.7 million colors at 1280x764 with its 8 meg of SGRam. Early benchmarks under WINBENCH '98 placed the XPERT@Play in its 8 meg version at 20% FASTER than the Riva128 chipset (Direct 3d), but a new driver release made these boards much closer in D3d speed. Not content to stop there, ATI is now working on a twin texel solution (as nVidia's TNT and 3dfx V2 chipset). This new chip could easily place ATI up there with the other twin texture processing boards, which have a significant power advantage over other designs. The Velocity 128 3d used the Riva 128 chipset, nVidia's second generation chip. The Riva 128, with a 128 bit pipeline and 3.5 million transistors, used 100MHz SGRam and was rated at 20 billion operations per second or 100 million pixels/sec. Like the Canopus Pure 3d the board also had an output for your TV. However, the Riva is in the class of the Voodoo Rush chipset and does standard 2d also, with built in Vesa 2.0. The V128 will even coexist in peace with a Voodoo based board. More recently nVidia released their TNT (for twin textel) technology. This chip more than doubled the power of the Riva 128 design, and the first release of a board using the chip was STBs Velocity 4400. This may prove to be the hottest D3d solution this year. Rendition is not out of the picture either! In the winter of 1998 Rendition released their 2nd generation chipset, the 2200 and its variant the 2100. With an integrated 230MHz RAMDAC (170MHz on the 2100), improved Z-buffer, support for AGP and up to 16MB of SGRAM, hardware MPEG-2, video input and output, and at least double the performance of the V1000. One of the early incarnations of this chipset on the Diamond Stealth II S220 was as fast as 3dfx in D3d at 640x480, and 40% faster at 800x600. There are no OpenGL drivers yet, however. 2d performance is better than the V1000, but not as good as other 2d/3d solutions. Still, for the dollar the card was a good buy at around $119. Recently Rendition announced their third generation chipset, the Redline. Its likely that this new chip will compete with the Riva TNT when released in the winter of 1998. |
In late February 3dfx released their VOODOO 2 chipset, which more than doubled the speed of their first offering with dual processors and a larger texture cache. This chipset is designed for both AGP and standard PCI. The new board has two texture processing units instead of one. The first is used to render triangles while the second texture-maps them. V2 will be able to simultaneously apply two textures to each triangle for single-pass, single-cycle rendering of effects such as trilinear filtering, lighting, spotlights, and image details. Unlike V1, V2 features triangle setup in hardware thus further offloading the CPU. These features increase rendering speed, but just as important they enable game developers to enrich objects with much more complexity, detail, and depth. The bigger surprise was that consumers could install TWO PCI Voodoo 2 boards in a single PC. The chipsets will automatically detect each other and begin operating in a mode 3Dfx calls "Scanline Interleave" or SLI for short. In the meantime if you aren't ready to go to Voodoo2, consider a 3dfx board with 4 meg of texture cache. Why? When a game has to draw a texture on a polygon, and that specific texture is not present in the texture memory, it must throw away some textures that are currently stored and load the new texture from main ram or disk and apply it to the polygon. This results in a slowdown of the game. As of this update (September 16/98) few have had their hands on the new Banshee boards. However, early results show that Banshee is about 20% faster than the first release V2 boards. Banshee is a 16 meg V2 board with faster memory technology and a 100MHz clock compared to the 90MHz clock of the first release V2 boards. Banshee, like TNT, is both a 2d and 3d solution in one chipset. But while Banshee is faster than V2, it isn't quite the speed of TNT in D3d. Furthermore, where TNT does very well at higher resolutions (800x600 and beyond) Banshee does not. And TNT is a full 2x AGP part, where the first release of Banshee is an AGP part only in name, lacking any AGP features at all. (The second release in early 1999 will be a true AGP part). NECs PowerVR2 is a great improvement over the first PowerVR chip but lacks some features that the top 3rd generation chipsets incorporate. Rendition, 3dfx, and nVidia all have full feature sets. Lacking features like fog effects in hardware means that the chip will be slower than its rating when these effects are enabled. However, reports from users are indicating that the board is comparable in speed to 3dfx and looks just as good. I will finally be able to do hands on testing in the next week or so. Recent new entries into the 3d arena include the Matrox MGA G200 chipset. This chipset brings Matrox back into the main stream of 3d acceleration while maintaining their lead in 2d speed.
3d Terms, Definitions and Benchmarks What is alpha blending? What is depth cueing? How does MMX work? Is the AGP a new economic measure? I thought you'd never ask! For more information, go to...
AGP and MMX Explained
In late February 3dfx released their VOODOO 2 chipset, which more than doubled the speed of their first offering with dual processors and a larger texture cache. This chipset is designed for both AGP and standard PCI. The new board has two texture processing units instead of one. The first is used to render triangles while the second texture-maps them. V2 will be able to simultaneously apply two textures to each triangle for single-pass, single-cycle rendering of effects such as trilinear filtering, lighting, spotlights, and image details. Unlike V1, V2 features triangle setup in hardware thus further offloading the CPU. These features increase rendering speed, but just as important they enable game developers to enrich objects with much more complexity, detail, and depth. What is the Accelerated Graphics Port specification? What difference does it make? What is MMX and do you need it? For more information see:
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