3dfx

Welcome to the second half of our GDC coverage. This article includes information on 3dfx, NVIDIA, EPIC, Matrox, Karna, Creative Labs, and S3/Diamond.

VSA-100

Ah, the Voodoo Scalable Architecture finally makes an appearance. After a false alarm, 3dfx announced that the US debut of the VSA-100 would take place at GDC.

The 3dfx booth

Our final meeting on Friday was with 3dfx. While all most of FiringSquad had spread out to various meetings during the day, our entire 5-man entourage gathered together for the 3dfx meeting. Everyone wanted to see the VSA-100 in action. Not to be outgunned, 3dfx fielded a team led by Brian Burke, Bubba Wolford, and Gary Tarolli.

Alex 'Sharky' Ross and 3dfx's Brian Burke

Show us the V5!

Since Scott Sellers already gave us the VSA-100 power point presentation at Comdex, so we decided to skip directly to the technology demonstration. No need to waste precious minutes looking at slides! We all gathered around the Voodoo 5 machine in the meeting room. Brian told us the machine was running on a PCI V5 card. Bubba demonstrated the card's FSAA (full-scene anti-aliasing) capabilities in Falcon 4.0.

FSAA in Falcon 4.0 was very impressive. If you take a third person view, you'll normally see "jaggies," rough pixilated edges around the outline of the plane, and the runways on the ground are a shimmering, jagged mess. Enabling FSAA smoothes out the jaggies, and stops the shimmering effect. We watched as Bubba toggled FSAA on and off during the game, and the change is very noticeable.

A shot of the RAM

The jaggies on the plane smooth out without blurring, and the runways become clear. If you look out the side of the cockpit without FSAA, you see a missile with edges that look like they were drawn in MS Paint. Enable FSAA, and you get a nice looking weapon of mass destruction. The game didn't seem to slow down at all when FSAA was enabled, but flight sims don't really require the frame rate of FPS (first person shooter) games.

Close up of the RAM

The board!

Guess my weight?

Bubba told us that he had started asking people to guess the resolution while FSAA was enabled in an 800x600 game. Most people answered 1600x1200 or 1280x1024. One guy guessed 1024x768, but he admitted that he thought Bubba was up to something and decided to lower his estimate.

Why is FSAA important when you can just run a game at 1280? For one, 3D accelerators are progressing to the point where the monitor becomes the bottleneck. 1GHz+ processors will soon allow hardcore Q3 players to reach 150fps at 640x480, but most monitors can only refresh at 100 or 120Hz at that resolution. Why not take advantage of all those extra frames and enable FSAA? Also, 3dfx's FSAA is done in hardware and works for all games. You don't have to worry about Glide, OpenGL or Direct3D support.