If v3 was a product of bad management, what was voodoo5?
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=923&p=9
" many users are upset with 3dfx for only supporting 16-bit rendering. 3dfx's response has been that their internal calculations are processed with 24-bit accuracy and then dithered to 16-bit, providing something similar to a hypothetical 22-bit color output, however the market is generally not buying that response at all.
"
Thought it was 32 bit internal, guess it was just 24 bit internal. Matrox did the same thing, and so do all powervr chips, iirc correctly, except they also provided the option for external.
"Just looked up mym old 3dmark scores, 195.9 megatexels fill rate
TEXEL, yeah. Not pixel... "
When you're doing single texturing, isn't it the same as the pixel rate? I mean, isn't that the purpose of them having both a single texturing and multitexturing test, to see how high its pixel rate is, and to see how high its multitexturing test can be when provided with as many layers as the hardware supports? Besides, those neon250 cards were agp cards, I had a pci voodoo, at a bit of a disadvantage eh?(half the potential bus speed the voodoo card could support I think, but the neon250 used agp4x)
BTW, how come for both psx and n64, the glide plugins are generally more compatible, full featured, and faster? Just happened that the plugin authors are more fluent in glide?
Voodoo cards also support 8bit palletized textures, which I remember was a big deal to me and my friends back in the day. Not sure how many games actually used that, but it sucked for them to get their new geforce and have to play their game in software rendering.
Also, from the banshee feature list....
Per-pixel MIP mapping and alpha blending
Most accurate LOD calculations
Internal rendering calculations @ 32bpp
Programmable expotential and fog-table
Floating point Z-buffer to eminate z-aliasing
Dynamic environment mapping
Bumpmapping
Full speed Trilinear Mip mapping quality
Full scene "order independent" edge anti-aliasing
3D rendering up to 2k by 2k surface
So internal 32 bit, bumpmapping, trilinear, and I doubt they reduced the voodoo3's capabilities.
16 Bit Floating Point Z-buffer
Games are designed for 64k Z-values
Content Developers: 24/32-bit Z-values
32-bit Z will run at half the speed of a 16-bit Z
32-bit Z requires double the memory storage
Games require high frame rates, not long depth range
32-bit Z buffer is primarily useful for CAD applications
16-bit floating point Z is more precise than some 24-bit fixed point Z buffers
Banshee's 16-bit W-buffer implimentation has ~22-bits of integer accuracy
So does that mean it can still run 32bit games, but at half speed and twice memory storage? Also, it seems they use the 16bit floating point capabilities to emulate 22-24bit integer accuracy?
"For one, the Voodoo 5, like a number of Voodoo products before it, includes a post filter that modifies images after they're rendered, but before they're output to the display. You may have heard 3dfx advocates talking about "22-bit color" output from the Voodoo 3 a while back. In 16-bit color mode, the Voodoo post filter averages pixel colors together. This filter smoothes things out, but sometimes causes images to look over-filtered, smeary, or dirty; or it introduces line-by-line horizontal banding. In its "high quality" mode, though, the 3dfx post filter arguably improves 16-bit image quality. "
So 3dfx's higher quality 16bit does exist.
"Why not? Probably because the VSA-100 chip won't do trilinear filtering and single-pass multitexturing at the same time. Because single-pass multitexturing improves performance, I suspect 3dfx decided to cheat things a little by not enabling trilinear filtering in their OpenGL drivers. Doing so would hurt benchmark performance versus some competing cards, where adding trilinear is "free" thanks to their rendering pipeline configurations. "
So the choice is between single pass trilinear or single pass multi texturing...doesn't say it can't do multitexturing and trilinear though.
Also found one interesting thing while looking around, the radeon 8500 couldn't do anisotropic and trilinear at the same time. Judging by the rest of the voodoo's comprimises(well, voodoo3-5, voodoo1 and 2, believe it or not, did lack features the voodoo 3 had), it would probably be done in a similar way. Couldn't find any articles on the voodoo having anisotropic though.(though I did find one person complaining that they can't enable anisotropic on their voodoo3 because the performance hit is too great) Oh wait, n/m, look what I found....
http://www.guru3d.com/voodoo3.htm
The Specs
Dual 32-bit texture rendering architecture
Single pass multi-texturing
Full hardware setup of triangle parameters
Support for multi-triangle strips and fans
Single Pass, Single-cycle bump mapping
Single Pass, Single-cycle tri-linnear mip-mapping
Alpha Blending on source and destination pixels
Sub-pixel and sub texel correction to 0.4x0.4 resolution
Per-pixel atmospheric fog with programmable fog zones
Full-scene polygon-based edge anti-aliasing
Floating point Z buffer
True per-pixel, LOD MIP mapping with biasing and clamping
Texture composting for multi-texture special effects
8-tap anisotropic filtering
Support for 14 texture map formats
8-bit palletized textures with bilinear filtering
Texture compression through narrow-channel (NCC) YAB format
It even have my beloved 8-bit palletized texture support! Oh, 8-tap aniso too.
Further down in the page, it says the voodoo3 supports a 4:1 compression ratio....using palletized textures and NCC. I'm guessing there's a reason this couldn't be used in every game like the dc's graphics chip's texture compression?
"Q: What is the highest color depth available for the 3D output? Is it still 16-bit color or has it been updated to 32-bit color? A: The Voodoo3 uses internal rendering calculations @ 32bpp with a proprietary compression algorithm to store results at 16bpp. This gives us the best of both worlds: high color depth and low memory bandwidth! "
"Q. Does Voodoo3 support anisotropic filtering?
A. When we launched at Comdex ‘98, this was primarily a software feature which we decided not to productize after having reviewed the resulting image quality that it provided.
Q. Does Voodoo3 support full scene anti-aliasing?
A. This is another primarily software feature that is under review.
"
Not sure what these mean, but the fsaa one goes along with what I remember from the super sampling program, it used the cpu to perform the supersampling.
"3Dfx Voodoo is one of the most successfull trademarks of the computer hardware industry, beaten only by the Apple Macintosh and IBM PC brand-names. Is the Voodoo 3 a product worthy it's name? We say it is. "
I can only laugh at this.... comparing the voodoo to two other failures, why not windows if they had such a high opinion of it? Oh well, I used to compare 3dfx to sega, and look how that turned out, sega nearly died too.
Look, by nature, framebuffers are hardware (ie: typically: memory chips), and what games is it you think use "hardware frame buffers" for shadows? Typically, shadows are made either with either a stencil buffer (which only vsa100 supports) or with shadow buffers, which no voodoo chip supports.
