Just to give you an idea of how far 3Dfx Interactive has progressed with Voodoo3 in terms of its prognosticated fill rate, we've done up a comparison in graphical form. For those of you not yet in the know the use of MegaTexels is based upon a 'Texel', which is simply a bilinear textured pixel:

The Voodoo3 part I saw, was only out of FAB three days prior to the show itself. Scott Sellers told me that it took all of three hours to have Quake 2 up and running (this might well be due to the fact that 3Dfx has indicated that the Voodoo3 will be backwards compatible with the Voodoo Banshee). So what did I expect for a board only a few days old? I certainly didn't expect it to be stable. Nevertheless together with Dennis 'Thresh' Fong and Kenn from Thresh's Firing Squad, we locked the door and did some serious benchmarking for a couple of hours. The results left all of us smiling and there were absolutely ZERO crashes whatsoever. Apart from the 1152x864 and 1280x960 modes, the rest of the resolutions ran swimmingly and 1600x1200 looks like being a SERIOUS resolution in terms of playability. Just think of the 'sniping' possibilities! NVidia did attempt to offer 1600x1200 in Quake 2 and as great as it looked, it's certainly far off from being playable at some 18 frames per second on a Pentium II 450Mhz. This makes the 32 frames per second we saw running with the Voodoo3 a seriously big leap forward. Although Marty Franz, Director of VPG at 3Dfx, went on to tell me that the driver set that we were using for the benchmarks was, as expected, very early. And don't forget that with the graphics clock being locked at 160Mhz the scores were of course about 20-25% lower than can be expected when the final silicon allows the graphics clock to be locked at 183MHz.