Chipset Features
3D Features
- 143 MHz clock speed
- 6 million triangles per second
- 286 megatexals per second fill rate
- 100 billion operations per second
- 128-Bit 3D acceleration
- Dual, 32-bit texture rendering architecture
- True multi-texturing. 2 textures per-pixel per-clock
- Full hardware setup of triangle parameters
- Support for multi-triangle strips and fans
- Single pass, single-cycle bump mapping
- Single pass, single-cycle trilinear MIP-mapping
- Sub-pixel and sub-texel correction with 0.4x0.4
resolution
- Per-pixel atmospheric fog with programmable fog zones
- Floating point Z-buffer (W-buffer)
- True per-pixel, LOD MIP mapping with biasing and
clamping
- Highly accurate LOC calculations
- Texture compositing for multi-texture and special
effects
- Support for 14 texture map formats
- 8-bit palletized textures with full bilinear
filtering
- Texture compression through narrow channel YAB format
The Voodoo 3 2000 is pretty feature pack. The
only thing that it's really missing is lack of 32 bit rendering and AGP
texturing. For now this isn't really a big problem. However the next wave of 3D
games might show that the Voodoo 3s will not be the number 1 choice for gaming
anymore. Then again, for $129 you really can't go wrong getting this card.
One of the biggest selling points of 3Dfx
cards has always been it can run all the 3D games on the market. 3Dfx is the
only video card company that can claim this. The Voodoo 3 2000 support Direct
3D, OpenGL and 3Dfx Glide.
While some people say Glide is not important
anymore (and for the most part they would be right) there are still games being
released that will not support Direct 3D or OpenGL out of the box. Tribes is a
good example. If you want to run that game the way it was meant to be run, you
needed a Voodoo card because it only runs with 3Dfx Glide. Don't have a Voodoo
card? Then you're running it in software mode. Another example is Unreal. Epic
does have a Direct 3D patch for the game now but for the longest time it was
Glide only. Even to this day, Unreal runs best with 3Dfx cards.
Next page: How fast is this thing?
