NVIDIA (no booth)

NVIDIA showed the Aladdin TNT2 chipset that was developed with ALi in a press conference at CeBIT. NVIDIA didnīt have their own booth. They said no word about NV 15 besides that itīs coming. But you could here some rumors that itīs delayed for about 6 weeks. The reason are not  problems with the chip but NVIDIA really has no reason to release a new chip too soon. 3dfx is month away of releasing their new Voodoo series so they can go on selling GeForce chips. The only thing that seems to be sure: There will be two chips: NV11 and NV15, both with up to 64MB memory.

3dfx Interactive (Hall 9, D36)

The long awaited presentation of the new 3dfx Voodoo series with VSA-100 was here and left me with a disunited impression. What they showed was very interresting but way away from a final product. The new cards were only shown behind the doors. They showed a PCI card Voodoo5 5000 on a MAC G4 with the game Star Wars Racer in 640x480. They switched between normal and Anti-Aliasing by hotkey. The AA quality is pretty good but they showed it at 16Bit and this really looks too worse without the AA at this color depth. Another factor here: The AA image looks more blury and unsharp than the original image - an effect of AA you can also see in image editor software.

On a PC they ran a special version of Q3Test v1.08 with a V5 5000. For direct comparsion they used a GeForce card aside. The advatages of AA could be seen very clear, even when the GeForce system ran at 1280x960 compared to the V5 at 640x480 with AA. But the V5 image was very unsharp at all. It seems that 3dfx used a special Glide Miniport driver here and so you also had the less contrast and blury image that appears with Glide at low resolutions. So the 32Bit Q3 look and feel of the GeForce was not as bad as 3dfx wanted to tell us. 16Bit Glide is not as good - even with AA. They spoke of RAMDAC problems here but I think itīs also an effect of AA.

I was surprised of the effect of Motion Blur. It looks a lot better when you see it in real than on the screenshots that were shown in the web before. You really can do interesting things in games with this. The only problem here is that it cost performance. AA is "for free" with V5 but all T-Buffer (Depth of field, Motion Blur...) effects cost performance and they also must be supported by games. I asked 3dfx about upcoming games which support T-Buffer but they couldnīt tell me one. The reason: They were not yet able to give away any sample boards to game developers.

The performance of the card was good with Star Wars Racer but rather bad (seemed to be about 5fps sometimes) in OpenGL with Q3. But this may be because of early Alpha drivers and Alpha Silicon chips running at only 100MHz instead of the final 166MHz.
At all I hoped to see a bit more from 3dfx at CeBIT. The new Voodooīs have some really nice features (I really like Motion Blur) but 3dfx is a bit late. They speak of first sample cards in April and of shipping in mai - thatīs about 6 month after the announcement of VSA-100.

Also very interesting: You could catch a look on the upcoming games Star Trek Voyager, Vampire: The Masquerade and Dark Reign 2 on the 3dfx booth running on Voodoo3.

Copyright: RIVA Station 2000 - Lars Weinand
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