New Voodoo 5 cards

[Amarok]

well they will be out soon check out the specs here
www.3dfx.com/prod/voodoo/v5-6000-overv.html

[Hellmund]

They released one or two already as on a voodoo overclocking site I saw a full color hi-res pic of the 6000 with 128megram.
I don't think it could fit in practically any cases.
It looked about 2 foot long with nothing but vidram chips.

[RobRich]

The v5 6000 is massive in size. It will not fit most AT motherboards, and 3dfx has already stated this in a earlier news leak. The card that most will be interested in will be the v5 5500, which has 64meg of memory and 700-800 MegaTexel per second fill rate. When used with 2x FSAA (4x is really suited to 6000 series), then it should offer some very nice graphics.

What I don't like about the multichip VSA-100 architecture is the non-unified memory configuration. The specs state unified, but that is only for frame buffer storage, which only accounts for a small part of what is rendered. The texture storage in still redundant, just like with the earlier voodoo based cards. That means that even the big 128meg 6000 card can only effectively hold 32meg of non-compressed texture information (128meg / 4 VSA-100 chips = 32meg of textures). It does give it the bandwith, since this technique gives it 4x the bandwidth of just sdram alone, but the memory is limited. Considering next gen nVidia have 64-128meg of unified DDR memory, I think 3dfx went the wrong direction with this. Maybe s3tc \ 3dfx's own texture compression schemes will catch on, but I doubt it in the near future.

With all that said, if no one else can deleiver the raw fill rate of the 6000 series card, I might frop the $600 US for it. But I most likely will invest in an ATI's RageON card or nVidia's GF256-II. Hopefully my rumored info is true: The GF-256-IIBR "Blade Runner" will support 2 graphics chips, similar to ATI's Rage Fury Maxx. If so, 3dfx might have some SERIOUS fill rate competition.

[batmeat]

At 3dfx's most recent show, it was mentioned that the new voodoo's will out around May/June.

[Szech]

B'oh!!! Then nVidia probably won't release NV-15 until about that time. Why release a better product when your current product is already on top?

[seti]

nvidia is releaseing the gf2 on april 25th Szech. Though who knows when they'll be avalible.

[Szech]

Is Nvidia pretty good about their release dates? I never kept track of them until TNT2.

[seti]

Opps...I used the wrong word. Releasing and announceing are quite different. Nvidia is announceing the gf2 on the 25th...sorry!!!

[Wilan Wong]

I'm just guessing this but I think that the lowest member of the Voodoo5 would outperform the GeForce 256 DDR because of its massive fill rate. Today games don't rely on lighting and transformation as much as the fill rate. So the fill rate would determine the performance of today's games. The GeForce 256 DDR would outperform the Voodoo4 though. I have a couple things looking forward to the new Voodoo's is that they are finally going to 32-BIT AT LAST!!!! I expect their Voodoo5 6000 to be VERY powerful because of its massive fill rate (1.33 Gigapixels and 1.33 Gigatexels). The new Voodoo's would also be more superior to the Voodoo3 because that have 2 pixels per clock instead of 1 pixel per clock on the Voodoo3. But I think that nvidia's GF2 may be more powerful. I haven't seen the specs for the GF2 yet, can someone post a link. Thanks!

[RobRich]

I could past several links, but no finalized specs have been released. Everything that is floating around concering the GF256-II is basically rumors and conjecture. What should be expected though:

400+mhz DDR ram
128meg max memory support
700-900 MegaTexel per second fill rate
20 million T&L rate
a complete 1.2!! OpenGL driver set