The final stop on the Sharky Extreme UK tour took place today at the plush new 3Dfx Interactive office in London's (extremely posh) Mayfair district. We figured that it had been a while since our last murmur on 3Dfx Interactive (see Voodoo3 preview) and hence spent the afternoon with 3Dfx's President & CEO Greg Ballard and worked in a session with Developer Relations guru Brian Bruning. Although we shared some exquisite English honey roasted peanuts, the part that you, our readers, will be most interested in, is 3Dfx's strategy for Voodoo3 and beyond.

Ok, so we know that the 3D add-in card industry is rapidly mirroring the product life cycle of the PC CPU. Intel comes out with a new CPU roughly every six months and guess what… so will 3Dfx, NEC/VideoLogic and the rest. If 3Dfx stays true to form, anticipate Voodoo3 items to emerge at the 3Dfx Immersion Conference in mid-March. From 3Dfx's point of view, the Voodoo3 will come in the two original flavors being the Voodoo3 -2000 (clocked at 125Mhz) and the Voodoo3 -3000 (clocked at 183MHz). But from our benchmarks done at Comdex, the hardcore gamers amongst you weren't overly impressed. Clocked at 183MHz, a fully loaded Voodoo3 won't exactly be leaving the Voodoo2 SLI configuration coughing in the dust. It will be a bit faster but perhaps not enough to warrant existing Voodoo2 SLI owners pulling out their rig in exchange for a Voodoo3 -3000. But 3Dfx feels very strongly that the hard core gamer in the market for a new card will be thrilled with it.