3dfx & TnL?

[Kaotik]

I decided to build myself a Glide machine, powered by 833MHz P3 (or Celeron, can't remember which it was), 256MB mem (okay, it's overpowered etc, but it's the slowest I could get my hands on without paying anything)
Video side will be either Voodoo3 PCI (if the card works) or Matrox G200 + Voodoo2

But that's not what this thread was about, while searching for some ideas on more Glide games I could get, I stumpled upon a site called 3dfx-Altar
There's a section with "Special Products", mentioning 2 "TnL" cards - Voodoo2 T&L and Voodoo3 T&L

The Voodoo2, according to site, was going to be a product by RealVision, combining normal Voodoo2 with their own(?) GA400 geometry chip

The card never apparently got out, however

The second, more interesting one is the "Voodoo3 T&L"

That's a Voodoo3 without doubts, but it has quite large extra chip on it and a secondary output I'm not sure on what it is.

There's practicly no info about it on the site, but I was hoping someone here could shed some light on that particular card

 

[no-X]

That's Mitsubishi IMPAC-GE geometry processor. 3Dfx never finished microcode for that thing.

 

[Kaotik]

That's Mitsubishi IMPAC-GE geometry processor. 3Dfx never finished microcode for that thing.

In other words, 3dfx actually did plan to release a "TnL" version of Voodoo3?

 

[Dave Baumann]

Voodoo 5.

 

[Kaotik]

Voodoo 5.

So what's up with the Voodoo3 board with one, then?

 

[Dave Baumann]

Test mule? Something for a arcade customer? Work for / by Quantum 3d? Could be any number of reasons (though I suspect the first to be the primary reason).

V3 was a relatively low cost solution, and the cost this would have brought for the performance increase I doubt would have been justifyable. On Voodoo 5, where the chip was also supposed to act as the bridge, it becomes a little more sensible.

There's an older thread on it this type of stuff here. Unfortunatly the linked presentation in that thread is not at that location since the server move.

 

[no-X]

Just an experiment. As I know, this card has nothing to do with Q3D. You can ask Hank Semenec for more information...

http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=248&whichpage=15


//edit: there is a lot of interesting V3 prototypes:

Voodoo 3 aplha with external RAMDAC:

Voodoo 3 MCM prototype:

Voodoo 3 with unique 3Dfx LCD-FX chip

Voodoo 3 - 3500TV alpha - from STB - this experimantal board wasn't even equipped with V3 chipset, it was designed around TNT - just for testing of the multimedia chipset:

or - the best one: Voodoo 3 power-board (used for testing of power supplies for V5-6000):

 

[swaaye]

Voodoo mutants, eh.

 

[swaaye]

How about a Rendition Verite V2200 with a Fujitsu FGX-1 geometry processor? None of these hybrid boards ever seem to make it out! Well, as long as you ignore the Permedia cards I guess.

 

[Dave]

There were no plans to release a V5 with T&L. There were early workings, obviously, with a secondary T&L chip but 3dfx was so mismanaged that nobody was able to focus a single project until the end, resulting in the significant delay in Rampage (the first processor that would have had it) and thus the failure of the company.

 

[Dave Baumann]

Dave, the napalm.ppt file was a dev rel document. It was going over the capabilities of Voodoo 3 and also detailing VSA-100 capabilities for developers. They listed T&L for V5 in that document, so clearly they planned to release, but never actually got round to it.

 

[Kaotik]

I found the napalm presentation btw, just don't have place to put it to in case someone wants it

 

[Simon F]

I found the napalm presentation btw, just don't have place to put it to in case someone wants it

You can try google pages.

 

[Kaotik]

You can try google pages.

http://kaotika.googlepages.com/napalm.ppt

 

[PsychoZA]

Stop talking about 3dfx, you're making me sad...

 

[Dave]

Dave, the napalm.ppt file was a dev rel document. It was going over the capabilities of Voodoo 3 and also detailing VSA-100 capabilities for developers. They listed T&L for V5 in that document, so clearly they planned to release, but never actually got round to it.

Dave,

As I noted, "there were early workings," but my point was simply that we did not have any plans of coming out with a V5 after the fact that added T&L. V5 5500 was as good as V5 was going to get. The 6000 was canned and Rampage was next, followed by a new architecture.

 

[Dave Baumann]

I think there's some odd definition of "plans". Clearly there were plans to release a V5 with T&L, just as there were plans to release a V5 6000 (even after the T&L concept was removed), as both of these were detailed as forthcoming to developers, as evidenced by the napalm.ppt file. Neither of these plans came to fruition so the "plans" as they stood from actually releasing retail products had to change.

If there were never any plans to attempt to productize these solutions then they would have kept them as internal project and not disseminated the information to a wider external audience.

 

[Dave]

Dave,

I have to assume I'm not clearly articulating what I am trying to say. I'm not speaking of "plans" at any given time, I'm referring to the situation when V5 5500 was already on the market, when I was personally at 3dfx. Not prior to that. In other words, it was not a project that was continuing to be worked on upon the demise of 3dfx.

 

[Dave Baumann]

Yeah, by the time V5 5500 was on the market the plans had already been abandoned and they were trying to get either of the two PCI bridges to work instead for V5 6000.

 

[Ailuros]

That 3rd party T&L unit wouldn't had made any worthwhile difference to Napalm, other than increasing the cost of the final boards. SAGE on the mythical Rampage was a VS unit from what I recall and at the very least wasn't a slouch as that 3rd party thingy; rather the contrary.

I recall PowerVR having a T&L unit in those dual-chip arcade boards named ELAN. If memory serves well, I think it was capable of 10M Tris/s with a high number of lights for its time and a quite CPU bound platform.