The RADEON GPU (which is dissected in our Radeon Technology Guide) is clocked at 183MHz and is paired to 64MB of DDR memory also running at 183MHz (the equivalent of 366MHz SDR). With two pixel pipelines and three texture units, the RADEON can process up to six texels (textured pixels) per pass giving the Radeon a 333Mpixel and 1Gtexel fill rates. The transformation and lighting engine can render up to 30 million polygons per second

Like the GeForce2 Ultra, the RADEON also makes use of programmable pixel shaders. While the GeForce2 supports functions with two textures and two operations per clock cycle, the RADEON supports three textures and three operations per cycle. ATI has also incorporated a proprietary feature called HyperZ to save memory bandwidth on necessary calls to the Z-buffer, raising the effective fill rate. Four-matrix skinning and keyframe interpolation round off a feature-rich package, giving the RADEON the most hardware feature support for DirectX 8 of any current card.

3dfx's Voodoo5 6000 AGP uses four 166MHz VSA-100 processors working in concert to draw a 3D scene. Each VSA-100 has its own 32MB of 166MHz SDR SDRAM on a 128-bit memory bus. All together, the four chips have a total of 10.6GBps of memory bandwidth. Each VSA-100 can render up to two pixels per clock with one texture each, and with four VSA-100s, the Voodoo5 6000 AGP yields 1333Mpixels per second fill and texel rates.

The VSA-100 has a feature called the T-Buffer (which you can read about in-depth here), which acts as an accumulation buffer. The T-Buffer gives developers the option to perform calculations on an image after it is sent through the graphics pipeline without having to send the data through again. T-Buffer effects include but are not limited to FSAA, depth of field, motion blur, and soft shadows.

The Voodoo5 6000 AGP does not include hardware Transformation and Lighting (T&L).