The 2D Specs

• Fully integrated 128-bit VGA and 2D engine
• High-speed 128-bit Windows GUI acceleration
• Hardware acceleration for Bresham line draw, 2-edge polygon fill, scissor /rectangle clippers and full 256 ROPs
• Internal 256-bit datapath
• Source and destination chroma-keying for DirectDraw
• Color expansion and single-cycle block writes
• Accelerated 8, 16, 24 (packed), and 32-bit modes

Video Subsystem

• Support for utlra-high resolution displays on PC monitors, LCD flat panels, and HDTV (Digital Flat Panel Support via LCDfx on Voodoo3 3500 only)
• Resolutions of up to 2046x1536 at a full 75Hz screen refresh rate
• YUV 4:2:0 planar support
• 30 frames per second DVD playback with no dropped frames
• Supports the latest MPEG2 software CODECs via DirectShow
• De-interlacing using Bob Weave
• Separate gamma correction for video and graphics
• Auto page flipping using VBI for smooth motion video
• 350MHz Integrated RAMDAC
• Supports up to 24 bits per pixel or 16.7 million colors

The list is long and at first glance very impressive. Although we doubt we'll see eight million triangles per second in any game soon. One million is about today's maximum so there's some way to go yet for game developers and Intel to catch up. Just to give you an idea of how far 3Dfx Interactive has progressed with Voodoo3 in terms of its theoretical maximum 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:

Texel Fill Rates of 3Dfx Interactive Based Products

Voodoo3 -3500	Voodoo3 -3000	Voodoo3 -2000	Voodoo2 SLI	Voodoo2	Banshee
366Mtexels/s	333Mtexels/s	286Mtexels/s	360Mtexels/s	180Mtexels/s	100Mtexels/s