The Big 3D Fight: Part II

Written: 11/23/99
Written by: Jellebee

3dfx and NVIDIA

Back to 3dfx for a little while before we wrap up this issue with NVIDIA. Firstly let me say that I am not a ‘3dfx basher.’ I am just one voice in a sea of millions. I have just been extremely fortuitous in the way that I have been given the chance to talk to so many on my ‘soap box’. It can be nice sharing your opinion whatever that is worth.

T-Buffer is what 3dfx call its accumulation buffer with a few things that are done slightly differently to the rest. How this accumulation buffer works is by sampling up to four passes (can be more, but four is about as much as these new cards would conceivably allow without too much of a performance issue) on the frame that is about to be displayed onscreen. The jagged bits are all smoothed out through this process culminating in a smooth picture of very high quality.

This is Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FS AA). The side effect from his is Motion Blur and Depth of Field. Hands up if anyone was impressed by 3dfx’s demo’s of this technique. Interesting. The demo’s that 3dfx showed to a few websites were not so good but the potential is there. To do all this you would require a massive fillrate as you are in effect rendering the same scene four times meaning that you need at least double the horsepower to do it. Simple aye? These effects though have to be implemented by developer coding for them. The FS AA does not require any new code.

The ‘Napalm’ card will do it automatically in the Voodoo 5. The rest of the effects though do need specialized coding. However developer interest in coding has been poor at best and terrible at worst. The fillrate is proposed to be of something like 1.37 billion pixels per second (1 gigapixel or 1000 mega pixels per second +). This may sound like a lot but this fillrate will get eaten pretty quickly with FS AA, and at high resolutions you can bet games would demand a higher fillrate still to implement FS AA and all its effects. There is no such thing as a free lunch ever. Unless you mother is cooking it for you.

The Voodoo 4 will not enable the T-Buffer as announced at Comdex. I am sure most of you will have seen the specs of the various cards 3dfx will be offering to gamers in March 2000. However to get the claimed 1 billion pixel fillrate you will need a Voodoo 5 6000 and that is not cheap (ESP $600!!!). One thing to mention is that the Voodoo 4’s performance will be slightly greater than the Voodoo 3 3500 at best and in my opinion should not be classed as a next generation card as all the features it adds that are new to 3dfx have been around for quite sometime (since October 1998 in fact).

Voodoo 5 with its T-Buffer could be a next generation part but in effect the only next generation feature is the T-Buffer. As has been demonstrated with the program Tea Buffer Anti Aliasing and motion blur could be implemented now in older generation cards like the TNT or even the Voodoo2 but the frame rates would stink because of the lack of a high enough fill rate.

FXT1 is a new compression standard which is of better quality than S3TC and therefore better than DXTC (they being the same thing). However, S3TC has not had widespread support yet from anyone and now 3dfx is asking for a new standard for people to adopt. FXT1 is not even in DirectX7 at the moment and may have to wait until DirectX8 for implementation in the Microsoft API. Is it worth it? I don’t know. I don’t think so.

One question worth asking 3dfx is this: Will a fillrate of 1 gigapixel/sec be enough to increase polygon count by up to 10 times as NVIDIA are claiming they have done with T&L, with or without switching ‘on’ the T-Buffer?

Another mystery is why did 3dfx delay their cards to Spring next year? To obtain a fillrate of 1000 mega pixels per second and more they would need to have a clock speed of 250 MHz if they have a quad texture pipeline similar to S3 or NVIDIA. Or they could develop a multi chip solution. We know now that 3dfx chose a multi chip solution and one that is quite innovative in fact. The VSA-100. Why innovative? The possibility to have a multi chip solution up to the order of 32 VSA-100 chips running together is quite breath taking. Obsidian have already announced that they will have a 32 chip solution in development with up to a maximum possible on board 2 GB RAM. Pretty meaty but not for the average hardcore gamer as it will cost around $40,000. Start saving now. . .more information is available at www.3dfx.com

This leads to the question will 3dfx have a T&L enabled chip for Fall 2000 as most graphic card developers should be on that path. Indeed Matrox have hinted at this, as have ATI and a new company called Gigapixel has made it a feature in their next generation feature list. S3 we know have it on their Savage2000 (which seems to be suffering from the classic problems of the Savage for i.e. bad drivers and performance loss at resolutions at and above 1024 X 768, if the early reviews are to be believed).

If the VSA-100 chip drops in price I predict that 3dfx will have a Voodoo X card out in October (barring any delays) with eight chips together on one board or that they will make tweaks (for example Environment Bump Mapping/Cube Mapping) to the Voodoo 6000 and sell it as another next generation product significantly cheaper than the current price of the Voodoo 6000 which is around $600. Why would I make this statement? One thing 3dfx has taught the rest of the world at its own peril is that they love the motto ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’. Plus the fact that VSA-100 has been in development for around 15 months or so 3dfx claims.

One thing 3dfx have been claiming all along is that there are no games that use T&L at the moment and none that will be out for a while. So they have made a card that will impact games now. Speeding up all games not just the enhanced T&L games. Fair point but I don’t agree. If they never started the ball rolling now - who would have, for the developers? A developer would not implement a feature in their game if no card supported it when their game came out. It is like the Chicken and Egg situation, except that Eggs come from Chickens and the Chickens are the graphic card developers e.g. 3dfx, NVIDIA et al. Or something.

Next page: GeForce

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