Introduction

Twenty Questions

We spoke with Brian Burke and Scott Sellers last December about 3dfx's new VSA-100 architecture. It's now Februrary, and 3dfx's Peter Wicher, Director of Product Marketing, was kind enough to give us a twenty question follow-up interview. Questions are in bold, answers are in normal text.

FiringSquad: How has the atmosphere been at 3dfx with the impending arrival of the Voodoo4 and Voodoo5? Is the release still on schedule for volume in March?

We are all ready to turn the corner and get VSA-100 based products out the door. Our recent troubles are well documented, but they will be behind us when we have a new product to ship. We are still working for an early Q2 release. We are getting closer by the day, so every day it gets a little bit better.

FiringSquad: Have you received working samples of VSA-100 yet? If so, does it perform up to your expectations?

We have had samples back for quite some time. Our engineers have been encouraged by the results of the early samples. The full-scene AA is drop-dead gorgeous and the T-Buffer works beautifully.

FiringSquad: How does 3dfx view overclocking? There probably isn't as much danger in retail remarking as we've seen in the CPU industry, but is this a major concern? Will overclocking utilities be included in VSA-100 drivers?

Any component that has a clock, can be overclocked. However, with Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 the performance is so superior that there is no need to overclock. We guarantee stability at the shipped clock rate. We do not forsee remarking our chips as a big problem.

We know that our end users love to overclock, but there are some WHQL restrictions that come into play that affect what we can put in the box. We have to insure that what we put in the box is guaranteed to always work. I'm not able to tell you what we're going to do with Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 with regard to enabling overclocking but you just might find something different than what we did for Voodoo3 (which was nothing!).