Article on 3dfx's unreleased hardware

[Ailuros]

Are 3dfx employees still under NDA's regarding Rampage, Fear, Mojo, etc.?

3dfx maybe gone, but it'd be interesting to find out where they thought they were going technology wise. Sure there was supposed to be "Gigapixel tech", but how was it used, performance estimates, etc.

Here's the digit-life article which was written with the assistance of someone working for 3dfx, but I never knew who. Wavey might know who he was.

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/3dfxtribute/index.html

And here is another one for which I have no idea who the source was either:

http://rashly3dfx.tripod.com/products/rampage.html

One mistake they apparently all make is the claim that Fear would have been a "refresh" to Spectre. It was to be a high end Tiler. While Spectre wasn't fully dx8.1 compliant (due to PS 1.0 only/lacking address ops), Fear would have been fully dx8.1 compliant.

Single chip TBR card with 4 pipes/1 TMU and the geometry processor named Sage II with 250M vertices/sec theoretical and 125M vertices/sec sustained. I don't think anyone could have come up with definite performance estimates as final clock speed wasn't even certain, but MSAA for free shouldn't be too hard for it, being a Tiler.

By the way the second link's approach explains quite adequately under which conditions Spectre would have had essentially free MSAA, that Dave already mentioned.

 

[stevem]

Dave, could you please elaborate ?

Yeah Dave, please tell us again about Sega, BlackBelt, Rampage MkI, MkII, etc...

But, I do have to say that I would have still been disappointed at 3dfx's products. After all, they would apparently only focused on the rendering quality, and not new features for programmers to play with.

A priori dissappointed, eh...? Imagine the temerity of focusing on rendering quality circa TNT/2 era - or even in today's...? Lack of features for programmers or consumers...?

[Edit: Typo]

 

[Guest]

So... what I am saying? I am trying to show how useless this "if, if, if" kind of speculation with chips from the past is. It is as useless as speculating that if human would never had invented the wheel... (at least "c~o~n~f~o~r~d~a~b~l~e t~r~a~v~e~l~i~n~g"would have a bit different meaning when you have cubes in the place of wheels.)

You really hit the nail with that one nappejavascript:emoticon('8)')

But still sometimes it's fun to speculate on things like that. javascript:emoticon('')

javascript:emoticon('8)')And for you ignorants 3dfx products aren't dead People still using v3/v4/v5 and drivers now support winxp and latest games cause there is still a large demant for it.javascript:emoticon('')

 

[Guest]

LOL seems with this board you have to click instead of dragging them emoticons in here

 

[Mummy]

Are 3dfx employees still under NDA's regarding Rampage, Fear, Mojo, etc.?

Or, do they stay intentionally silent to let ppl continue to believe in the 3Dfx myths?

 

[ram]

well, imaging that would be the same as imaging that Pyramid3D would have been released in schedule on autumn 1996. Propably that would have changed things very much and perhaps 3dfx wouldn't been were it was later.

and yes, Pyramid3D would have owned all easily back then. programmable pixel and geometry pipelines, HW T&L, 2 two textures per pass and EMBM.

Pyramid3D, while it was a technicaly milestone, was not competitive at that time. It was slow like a dog due to its single 64bit memory interface and TriTech planned to charge way to much for the part in the beginning.

 

[horvendile]

Something that's been bugging me for the latest several years: Does TriTech still exist? If so, what are they doing?

If my memory serves me right, it was a Finnish company. Is that correct? No www.tritech.fi exists, but in Sweden there is a company called Tritech which develops electronic hardware (www.tritech.se). However, when I have asked them if they had anything to do with Pyramid3d, I just get blank stares.

Does anyone know?

 

[ram]

Something that's been bugging me for the latest several years: Does TriTech still exist? If so, what are they doing?

If my memory serves me right, it was a Finnish company. Is that correct?

AFAIK TriTech has gone. IIRC it was a company from Singapore which got some legal problems right at the time a new Pyramid3D derivate was ready to rumble.

 

[Guest]

Rampage ain't a myth dude it run and was ready for production it would have kicked major arse.

Nvidcrap could have released easily but he it was to fast so they decided they better off not doing that.

 

[Mummy]

Rampage ain't a myth dude it run and was ready for production it would have kicked major arse.

<sarcasm>Im sure u know how it would perform </sarcasm>

 

[Gunhead]

Horvendile, try Googling "Pyramid3D+ Tritech". Gobs of material. Good stuff too. The chip *was* advanced, if slow.

3D Wonderboy, go back to the 3dfx fansite you came from.

Nappe, stop beating the dead and already half-recycled horse. P3D would have ruled initially, then immediately sucked in the wake of Voodoo1 and Glide. Problem?