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Now that you've seen the benchmarks, you might wonder if there might be any other way to eke out a frame or two? Anyone smell overclocking? Again, I asked Sellers about the possibility of overclocking but it seems as though 183Mhz is as far as you're going to be able to go. There was absolutely no slider function in the drivers being used during the demo. Just like Intel and AMD, overclocking looks like being a thing of the past in the 3D graphics world. In all honesty, it's a shame for the few that appreciate the little performance gains to be had. It's also a 'big' shame for all those Fan manufacturers out there.
One other small tidbit was that, when Sellers was asked why 3Dfx had opted for a theoretical maximum of 16MB (SGRAM or indeed SDRAM) for the Voodoo3, he indicated that they were seriously considering doubling the maximum to 32MB. At least from a marketing stand point, 3Dfx will most likely enable the possibility of doing so for the Voodoo3 -3000, even though they've yet to establish a cost vs. performance advantage. We'll keep you posted though…
At this early stage it is all to easy to jump on the 'cynicism train' but the Voodoo3 specs do lack features that we would all like to see. Alas, 3Dfx Interactive has again neglected to include true 32 bit rendering capabilities. As with all previous 3Dfx products, the Voodoo3 will be limited to 256x256 texture sizes and have a 16-bit rendering ceiling. Their response is that delivering 32-bit color depth with a 24-bit z-buffer could possibly result in a performance hit such that it halves the frame rate. In which case, their core customer who wants to play at the highest frame rate possible wouldn't utilise these features so why should they pay extra for them?
With the Voodoo3 being on .25Micron, it allows for an extraordinary leap in terms of the graphics clock speed capabilities. 3Dfx has always been a company transfixed on speed. In other words, maximizing the frames per second in games such as Quake 2 is where their priorities firmly lie. Time and time again Scott Sellers would state to me,
"3Dfx would like to be able to set a MINIMUM of 60 frames per second when playing games. Anything less is totally unacceptable to us. Image quality isn't something that we have ignored for the Voodoo3. We feel our 16 bit rendering is as good as it gets."
And there's no denying that Scott has a valid point here. 32-bit rendering is one thing, but doing it at the expense of a huge performance loss in terms of frames per second isn't on. Unreal for example, looks stunning in 32bit, but at some 20 frames per second we're not going to be playing it. Gary Tarolli, 3Dfx Interactive's CTO and co-founder, also stated the following in a recent interview with us, which should go some way into explaining their philosophy:
"You should NEVER judge image quality without considering frame rate, at least for games. Hey - RenderMan quality blows away any hardware chip! But it's still a little slow right now. My point is that 32-bit rendering is obviously better quality than 16-bit rendering. That is not the point. The right question to ask is the combination of 32-bit rendering and the lower performance it entails better than 16-bit rendering and the higher performance it delivers. At this point, I would say 16-bit rendering still wins out for a better gaming experience. When 32-bit rendering gets a lot faster, it won't be so, but we will support 32-bit rendering by then. Look at games on Banshee in 16-bits - they look pretty darn amazing. In many games, you can't even tell the difference. Don't judge our 16-bits just by the fact that it's 16-bits! There's actually a lot of work we do to make it look better than just plain old 16-bits. It's actually more like 22-bits on the screen."
And what about full support for AGP 2X texturing? The spec sheet states that the Voodoo3 will feature an AGP interface with support for 2X with sidebands. But yet again 3Dfx has opted to use their 3GB/second local memory transfer capabilities as opposed to AGP 2X texturing. 3Dfx obviously doesn't believe in AGP 2X as much as nVidia does but that might change over the course of the year.
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