More 3dfx

Frame rate hit?

We asked about what kind of frame rate hit we'll see if we enable FSAA. Gary Tarolli explained that the performance hit would be different for each game, but he told us that the V5 will meet 3dfx's goal of 60 frames per second in 1024x768 with FSAA enabled.

Motion blur

After demonstrating FSAA, 3dfx showed us the motion blur feature in Quake 3. They enabled motion blur, and ran demo1 for us. I was about to tell them they forgot to type in "timedemo 1" right before they started the demo, but then I remembered that they wanted to show us motion blur (this hardware guy has been running too many Quake 3 benchmarks).

Zzzzzip!

Motion Blur in effect

Brian Burke warned us that the motion blur effect was highly exaggerated (and he was right), but he also told us that 3dfx will probably include some sort of slider bar to control the blur intensity. The demonstration was effective nonetheless -motion blur works. Players were running by with afterimages, and even the rotating ammo boxes were showing motion blur effects. Motion blur looks very promising, but it definitely needs some tweaking before it's ready for prime time.

Up up and away

Going up

Timeline

We asked Brian if anything had changed in the Voodoo 4/5 timeline, and he told us that everything is on track for an April launch. The board release order still hasn't been determined yet, but presales will begin later this month. Clock speeds will most likely be 166MHz or 183MHz, which translates into a fill rate of 333-366Mpixels/s for the basic Voodoo 4 4000, 667-733Mpixels/s for the Voodoo 5 5000/5500, and 1.33-1.47Gigapixels/s for the Voodoo 5 6000.

Full-scene anti-aliasing and motion blur and the other 3dfx T-buffer features will only be available on the Voodoo 5 cards. The Voodoo 4 doesn't have the fill rate to support the extra effects, but it looks like it has the potential to be a sleeper hit with the low-res, high-fps hardcore Quake 3 player community.

Benchmarks? No chance.

3dfx was running the demos off alpha silicon that wasn't close to the chip's final speed. Of course, this didn't stop us from asking for Quake 3 benchmarks anyway. Who knows, maybe we could have downclocked a Voodoo 3 to the same speed just to see the difference in frame rates at low resolutions. Brian Burke just laughed, and we moved onto the next topic.

We also tried asking about 3dfx's next generation Rampage technology, but the only thing we found out about it was that it's going to be "big." Guess we'll have to wait another six months before 3dfx lets us in on Rampage.

Sneaking in didn't work