3Dfx got things rolling at a bright and cheery 8:00am on Monday morning, the first day of the show. We were invited with the rest of the media hacks to attend their press conference at the Dive restaurant on the Vegas Strip. Personally, I thought we'd be seeing a product referred to in the previous few days before the show as the "Banshee 2". It turned out that the part description was right, but the name was wrong. In a last second decision, 3Dfx decided to name the part after their branded and successful Voodoo line of products.

Hence the Voodoo3 was born.

Only three days old at the time of its first showing, the Voodoo3 sports some impressive performance figures. Unfortunately the part offers almost nothing new in terms of additional graphic features support versus the Voodoo2 it's designed to replace. This left the majority of the press conference's cynical attendees feeling that they'd been duped a little bit…Here was a new product with the Voodoo moniker slapped on it, yet it really had nothing new technology-wise to separate it from an earlier Voodoo2 card save for a higher clock speed and a die-shrink.

Here's the wrap up for the Voodoo3 and the performance gamers can expect from it:

In May or June of next year, the Voodoo3 will debut in two versions. The first is a slower and less expensive OEM variant of the high-end part and is named "Voodoo3 2000". This part will be less powerful by a large margin versus a standard Voodoo2 SLI setup. It will likely also be somewhat less powerful than the upcoming nVidia TNT 2, which we'll outline later in this article. But it will be cheap enough that mainboard vendors will be able to drop one on their products for a low cost. The Voodoo3 2000 runs at 125MHz and includes 16MB of SGRAM as well as a standard Voodoo2 SLI core, which is included on all of the Voodoo3 chips.

The "Voodoo3 3000" is the new high-end chip part from 3Dfx and accordingly has impressive specs. With a core that runs at 183MHz, the Voodoo3 3000 will be the part that dominates the shelves for 3Dfx at retail locations. For now it supports up to 16MB of SGRAM. But we've been able to acquire information from 3Dfx's (not THAT kind of high) at 3Dfx that indicate they may add the ability to place support for up to 32MB of SGRAM on the Voodoo3 3000 by its launch date. This would require at least one more "spin" of the Voodoo3 chip, which is costly. Time will tell if this change can be made economically, but I'd bet that it's a shoe-in. The performance difference when running a 3D app at 1600x1200x16 between 16 and 32MB of SGRAM?

Up to 10% faster for the 32MB version according again to 3Dfx.

Not very much, but 3Dfx's competitors are all offering 32MB options on their new products which makes the Voodoo3 3000 part seem inferior to uninformed buyers.