A good place to start is the 3D capabilities of the chipset, which is after all what real gaming enthusiasts care about most. Listed below is the spec sheet for the Voodoo3 chipset:
3D Acceleration:
- Dual 32-bit texture rendering architecture
- True multi-texturing: 2 textures per pixel per clock
- Full hardware setup of triangle parameters
- Support for multi-triangle strips and fans
- Single Pass, Single-cycle bump mapping
- Single Pass, Single-cycle tri-linnear mip-mapping
- Alpha Blending on source and destination pixels
- Sub-pixel and sub texel correction to 0.4x0.4 resolution
- Per-pixel atmospheric fog with programmable fog zones
- Full-scene polygon-based edge anti-aliasing
- Floating point Z buffer (W buffer)
- True per-pixel, LOD MIP mapping with biasing and clamping
- Texture composting for multi-texture special effects
- 8-tap anisotropic filtering
- Support for 14 texture map formats
- 8-bit palletized textures with full bilinear filtering
- Texture compression through narrow-channel YAB format
That was what we came, saw and read at the press conference. Now here's my own personal thoughts on what I saw behind closed doors at some length:
As you can see from the 3D side, the Voodoo3 chipset specs virtually mirror those of the Voodoo Banshee. The only difference being the second TMU (texture memory unit), thus allowing for single cycles when attempting to do tri-linnear mip-mapping and bump mapping. Speed is certainly of the essence and single clock cycles for multitexturing is the way to do it. Think of the Voodoo3 like this: if you remember the original Voodoo Graphics being surpassed by the Voodoo2 two-fold, which had virtually the same architecture, then think of the Voodoo Banshee being surpassed by the Voodoo3 in a similar fashion.
A point worth mentioning is that not only are there no real additions in terms of advanced 3D features but that the 'bump mapping' feature given by 3Dfx on their spec sheet may indicate to some that the feature is actually done in hardware. This isn't the case, as bump mapping is done the very same way as it is on the Voodoo2 and Voodoo Banshee, by the aid of a nifty software trick. In fact even the Voodoo Graphics was capable of doing the exact same thing, only it was never listed as a 'feature' because the performance hit was way too hard.
