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3dfx' Voodoo5 6000 Still Alive
mr.blobby writes "3dfx' long awaited "big-daddy" version of the Voodoo5, the Voodoo5 6000 has been delayed almost as long as Daikatana but according to this news story, the card (with all of its four TMUs - texture memory units) and its external power supply has been sighted at a gaming trade show in London (ECTS) and is still slated for a release. There are a few benchmarks showing it beating NVIDIA's GeForce 2 which can't be bad. The author said this "the card was hitting around 50-60 FPS at 1600x1400", which seems most impressive."
Although I'm no expert on gaming (last one I played was Quake 1 , then dopewars a few years ago).. pushing for maximum FPS *Can* be a good thing , even if it is beyond a persons visual perception. I'm making this guess based on how the FPS checks are run... in a quiet battle field of quake 3 at 1024x768 brand "X" card can do Y frames/sec... now throw in three raging bots, two head hunters and all sorts of wizz bang visual effects and maybe rate Y with equal Y/2 .. ? (Or maybe CPU performance affects this much more than I think ? Somebody care to comment on that ?)
Man, you seem to be young. ...
Every current vidcart has at least 20fold the memory of my first compus (zx81, c64)
There is already a much better 3d video card out there... Go and check it!;-)
Remember that VooDoo2 SLI (2 VooDoo2's on one chip with 24MB RAM)? It cost around $550 or $600 depending where you got it. People still yanked those up. And that was when video cards/games/extreme hardware wasnt as poplular as it is today. So this should be interesting indeed...
As for loosing money, that may be true. However, 3dfx is still number one in sales according to this article.
What's the point of 50-60 FPS when broadcast video is ~30? Are we itching for a higher frame rate in movies and TV?
Actually, yes -- we are itching for a higher frame rate in movies and TV. Thirty frames per second really isn't fast enough to have objects move quickly across the screen without appearing jerky. It limits the speed you can pan across a scene, and it limits the speed at which you can move the important objects across the screen.
You'll probably never notice the jerkiness caused by fast side-to-side movement when you watch any professionally made movie. Why? Because cinimatographer's are very careful to avoid fast side-to-side movement. Since you'll never see them, you might not have ever even noticed that they're missing!
The same thing also plays heavily into the limits of a first person shooter. How fast you can spin, how quickly other objects can move across your field of view, even the width of your field of view, are all carefully controlled by the game designers. You can only spin around so fast, before the walls and other players start to jump around instead of slide around, and the limits are controlled primarily by your frame rate.
And, of course, frame rates faster than your video display hardware give the designer all sorts of interesting tricks -- anti-aliasing, motion blur, all types of interesting effects. And some of those effects (like motion blur) can make up for otherwise slow display hardware. So, a video card that can render a few hundred frames per second, but only display 70-80 (depending on the monitor) can still give game designers more leeway in game design -- there are a number of interesting tricks they can do before the video starts to appear choppy.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
>My current computer
or your current video card? Your video card has 160,000 Ko?
My first computer was a TRS-80 with 4K. I wouldn't use that in this comparison, though. I would go as far back as the 386 with 4Mb that was my first real PC after graduating college. I thought it was pretty ridiculous to buy a Voodoo2 a couple years back with 16Mb, but here I got a Matrox G400 this year with 32Mb. The damn video card has 8x the memory of my first system. Think the mach-8 on that system had a total of 256K of memory.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
What I'm talking about is a limitation in the medium itself, which in this case is film. Film is processed through a projector at 24 frames per second. So, in theory, if you move an X-Wing model across the camera's feild of vision at a rate of 24 inches per second, the model will have moved a full 1 inch per frame.
If you slow down the rate of the model to 6 inches per second, the motion will be very smooth and the human eye will not detect the fact that it is stop motion. Now take that model and push it towards the camera at a rate of 48 inches a second. There will be huge 2 inch gaps between the frames, where the 2 inch changes become more and more obvious the closer the model gets to the camera since it is moving towards it. This is the same effect as driving past a mountain that is 50 miles away, it appears to be standing still while the telephone poles are whizzing by.
For our final demonstration, take out one of your Star Wars tapes, if you have a VCR that can step through frame by frame it would help. Find a spot where a ship, energy beam, or anything flies close to the camera at a fast pace. Pause the movie, and step through one frame at a time. Notice the effect?
Now, take this same principle and apply it to gaming. If you turn your field of vision 180 degrees, you are going to be moving a lot of pixels around quickly. If you have only 30 FPS you are going to only be capturing a set of pixels for every virtual 'foot' or whatever measurement is accurate, that you traverse. This means an opponent could be lurking in a shadow, and because your FPS is too slow, you missed the frame where he is visable. IF on the other hand you have a card that can push 60-80 FPS, the motion will be very clean, faster than the eye can see, and you will be able to pick out every single 'inch' of territory mid-spin.
This whole topic really isn't technology specific, so where the stuttering originates is not relevant. The point is, dropped frames cause you to lose information.
By the way, the jerkiness caught on film is not easy to detect. You practically have to be looking for it. For all practical purposes it isn't detectable. This is why the film industry really hasn't made strides to convert from 24 frames per second to something higher. There are only a few situations where it is really noticeable. For the most part, your eye is fooled.
So if 24 fps is good for the film industry, why not the gaming industry? Like I have said before, the types of movement going on in a game are practically ALL the types of movement that show up as stuttery in film. Objects moving quickly towards you, ect, be it rockets or opponents. They generally do not film movies the same way a gamer plays a first person shooter, the audience would get sick if they did. :)
V
Like I said, I'm not sure. I know that I have heard the 60 number before. 30 sounds pretty low to me, otherwise you wouldn't be able to detect the 24 fps film discrepancies I was talking about in the above thread. The threshold would be too thin. Seeing rotors and wheels doing that weird effect wouldn't necessarily be proof of a 30 fps limit as they are rotating at a vastly higher rate. It could just as easily be an effect seen at anything over 60 fps. That is just an optical illusion based on something moving at a much faster rate than the fps limit. If we saw things at 400 fps, we might see the same effect yet. I wouldn't know though. I'm not sure of the equations for figuring that out.
V
It's not impressive on its own, but it's impressive that their chip scales. If they can miniaturize it a little and reduce power/heat, then who cares if your board has 16 processors on it?
As far as movement goes, the human eye vertainly can't perceive 60. About 40 probably maxes it out. You can still see improvement when you go from movies (24 fps) to TV (30 fps in the US), but it's so small that anything faster doesn't show up in the charts. ...) instead of pure fps.
The reason you need high framerates is because today's screens have almost nil afterglow of their phosphors. It used to be that a screen was stable at 60 hz. If you run a hi-tech screen at 60 hz it flashes the brains out of your eyes. So you need something like 80 (my minimal refresh rate to work in) or above for the image to become stable.
So, basically, if you want perfect smoothness you need to find a card that bottoms out at about 35 to 40 fps in each game you intend to play. And right now they all are around that point.
I'd like to challenge gamers to recognise the difference between a card doing 40 fps and one doing 60 fps. The placebo effect is very strong, and until you do a blind-test you just don't know if your whizz-bang ultra-gamers card is really so much better than a regular run-off-the-mill standard card.
You also see cardmakers realising this, because they're starting to push extra features (T&L, FSAA,
This ofcourse doesn't mean that you can buy a card now and run games on it at 40 fps for the rest of your life. There is such a thing as polygon count, and it matters. But, I think this whole fps obssedness gamers have is just like homeopathic medicine. It only works if you believe it.
The 'backwards wheel' effect is because of the difference in rotation rate vs. perceived framerate. If a wheel rotates 30 times per second, and you see it at 30fps, it will seem to be standing still (ignoring motion blur). Think on that a second.. the frame is captured with the wheel in exactly the same position as the previous frame... no apparent motion. If the wheel rotates at slightly less than the framerate then it will appear to rotate backwards. This difference in frequency can actually be decided by (wheel rotate freq.) mod (framerate).
In the practical, as opposed to theory, motion blur and motion relative to other objects also strongly influence percieved rotation.
Linux is so marginal that it's hard to express. Name one company with an architecture that's been out for less than a year that has "dedicated" support for their Linux user(s).
Judging by the size of that card I have serious doubts about whether it would even fit in my case, given the layout.
WOW!
Ok how many people have moniters that can do 1600x1400?
This will require some serious cash to get a moniter that can take advantage of the newest video cards.
That and the roughly $600 dollars for the card; who can afford all this anyway?
I got the Geforce DDR for $300 and I thought that was insanly expenesive. No way I am spending ($600 + ($500 to $1000)) dollars just to play at resolutions that don't look THAT much better then 1024x768.
guvf vf zl fvt
Framerate is not everything - in fact, I prefer picture quality over speed (of course only for some degree, but that's my preference - guess, I have a Matrox G400)
It does not impress me to see 70 frames of crap in a second - not even when it is in a resolution that exceeds the capabilities of my monitor.
Real life is overrated.
You eyes can see anything and everything, however, the brain can only interpit ~24 FPS.
Thing is the cards cost alot more to manufacture. With the new GeForce 256 Cards there is 256MB of DDR RAM. That's expensive, and with the Voodoo's they have to cram 4 chips onto a massive big bertha card with an external power supply just to *compete* with a GeForce.. makes me laugh.. and I'm sure it makes nVidia laugh all the way to the bank.. hahaha... 3dfx needs a new chip.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
Read the article.
They chose to have an external power supply so there would be less draw from the power lines on the AGP card. Also, if the fans are powered by a drive power connector, there's less magnetic distortion near the card, supposedly making for better reliability, but personally, I think it's overkill (except for the 4 fans, it's good that those are powered off of an externa powerline). Still, the V5 6000 will be slower than a GeForce 2 GTS; I think that they pulled that 1600x1400 figure out of their @$$; that res isn't even 4x3 or 16x9, it's 8x7, too close to square.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
It won't be long before the CPU is a card in a PCI slot on your ATX videoboard.
bp
The SharkyExtreme guy just guessed it. The FPS was probably 20FPS while the FSAA engine blended the frames together or something similarly screwy like 3dfx likes to do.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
does anyone know the motivation for the external power supply? will i have to plug in DC from the wall, or just a hard-drive type plug from the existing power supply. what's next, video cards get their own case?
/. poster #104543567
-stax
Honestly, 3dfx seems to be living in an alternate universe where people still care about them being the first affordable consumer 3D card company...They really need to bring something stunning to the market next cycle or NVidia's (and even ATI now) are going to stomp them so far into the ground...
From an earlier post it was said that no one really cares about 3d performance, esp. at high res. I know I am not the only one, but I work and play at high res, usually the highest available. (Currently I am using a VoodooIII 3000 AGP at 1600x1200x32 @ 75) I love graphics, and I really like them when they are crystal clear and defined. My current Voodoo runs almost every game/program at high res like a champ. No lost frames, high speed, high detail, and incredible performance. I'd buy the v5 6k if it has better performance. Already tried a GeForce2, and didn't see much a difference at high res. Its a good piece of technology, but it doesn't have the performance where it counts, to me anyway. It was better in lower res tho, I will admit. I say "right-on" to 3dfx, tho the price be way to high. External PS? Who cares! There are already three powerstrips that go there!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
What's the point of 50-60 FPS when broadcast video is ~30? Are we itching for a higher frame rate in movies and TV?
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Doesn't sound like you play 3d hardware-accelerated games, why do you care?
I mean, even the movie Battlefield Earth had good reviews before it came out. Never, ever trust benchmarks before they're made by people who were able to pick up the card off the shelves.
Besides, the very shape of this story (spotted at a tradeshow somewhere) has the smell of urban legend if you ask me...
Is anyone else concerned about just how much heat this will kick out into your system.
:).
A week or two back I put a Voodoo5 V5500 into my system along with a second 7200rpm drive, and now despite having extra fans having those two along with my Celeron300@464mhz i need to run with the case off.
Now i'm not much of a gamer - the v5500 was about the only card around the £140 (uk pounds) price tag that had decent win2k drivers - but if it takes about an hour of normal windows usage to have my motherboard temp hit 50C (120-something F) surely anyone playing games on it would toast it.
Now imagine twice the Gpus and twice the heat...
I think soon we'll find graphics subsystems coming in a seperate box and at this rate it'll soon be bigger than your pc and require its own 3 phase power feed from a deadicated nukelea-r generator (homer's running mine
The Voodoo4/5 don't have TMU's anymore. That was part of the old Voodoo archetechure (VD1/2/3). The VD 4/5 have VSA-100 (Voodoo Scaleable Archetechure).
Jeez, give us something at least a few facts to argue about next time.
Cheers,
Justin
"My cat's breath smells like cat food." - The Tao of Ralph Wiggum.
But you're blaming NVidia?! NVidia is still releasing drivers for the TNT! How's that for legacy support. If there are any functions from the TNT-chipset that you miss on your Annihalator Pro I'd like to hear them.
As for completely using a design before trading if for a new one, NVidia has released the GeForce256 -chipset three times now. As GeForce256, GeForce2 GTS and GeForce2 GTS Ultra, which are basically the same card with the exact same features. The only difference is the speed.
I guess you must be talking about Bizarro-NVidia.
A penny for your thoughts.
A witty
You're not seing a great difference with today's games because most of them (including Quake 3) don't use the GPU's acceleration of transform and lighting. Right now, I think MDK2 is the only game on the maket that uses it and many more are to follow suit real soon. The GeForce 1 is still ahead of it's time with today's games.
PCXL Forever!!!!
After all, nVidia has scheduled to release their next generation card in September. This is the card that supposedly uses the same chipset as the X-box (since nVidia is producing the chips for MS), which supposedly makes the PS2 look a bit like an 8-bit Nintendo.
Sure, the card would've been really cool 2 years ago when they said they were going to release it, but so would the Bitboys card. Personally I think its funny that 3dfx is going to be releasing a card that will barely beat the last rev from nVidia.
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Hmm... you work for nVidia huh?
~support your local slacker, buy me a new laptop!
From the Voodoo5 FAQ on www.3dfx.com:
4. Is the memory on the Voodoo5 boards unified or segmented? For example, on the Voodoo5 5500 AGP with two VSA-100 chips with 32MB of memory per chip, is the video memory 64MB or is it really just 32MB?
The video memory is unified, only texture data has to be repeated for each VSA-100 chip.
Gah? So if you get a 128Mb V6 and assume 4Mb framebuffer and zbuffer, it can hold 31Mb of textures? 93Mb just disappears?[makes indignant noises] I guess this is the only way they could get into the same ballpark as GeForce, but I bet the engineers had to hold their noses.
The only time 3dfx was ahead in the 3d industry was way back in the banshee and Voodoo2 years. But ever since NVidia entered the game, they've been ahead. Voodoo3 versus Riva TnT, voodoo3 versus Riva TnT2 Ultra, voodoo 3 versus GeForce, Voodoo5 versus GeForce 2. Notice a pattern here?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
He was probably looking at 15fps with the FSAA engine blending the frames together. 3dfx always takes the worst shortcuts like that.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
The thing I used to like about 3dfx is they could put pressure on nvidia to make better products.
The vd5500 linux drivers still only support one of the vidcards processors, I hate to think of spending that much money on something that is only going to run at 1/4 capacity in linux.
On the other side, last night nvidia released there xf86 4.0.1 v0.9-5 drivers. check www.linuxgames.com. Im using them now and they are working fantastic. Mostly stability and compatibility fixes. But open-source aside, nvidia seems to be more dedicated to supporting linux then 3dfx right now
A few of these anti- or pro- 6000 comments seem a bit off base, or are just irrelevant. First. So what if it take 4 chips? If a Dodge Viper with an 8 liter V10 smacks around the turbo V6 in the import (all else the same), who really cares? This alone is kind of a moot point. There is no law or rule saying you have to use a single chip or only 3.2 liters. As long as it meets emissions and gets the same gas mileage as its competitors, who really gives a rat's ass how they get there? Now, there are REAL penalties and issues that are caused indirectly with the brute force approach. Obviously price and gas mileage (or power consumption). The price is ridiculous. This we know, but it is not completely out of line compared to the $500 GF2 Ultra that it will compete with. The 4 chip/8 liter solution is not a good solution for the value/Ford Focus. The power issue is really a non-issue again because they will include an external 50W supply. If you've got $600 to blow on a video card, a $20 surge protector isn't going to break the bank. Now there is size. This is truely going to be an issue. Some people are already having problems with the 5500. I have a feeling the 6000 will be a real chore to install for those who don't have huge full tower cases.
-Vic If you can't figure out my email, then don't.
hey this rocks good open DRI drivers
I have been debateing about geting nvidia card but they dont seem to support DRI all that well
mesa support for 3dfx has always been good go to a BOF and find out !
if 3dfx sort it out their DRI drivers could be the best their are ! and then truly you could kick winnt @ openGL
the bench marks for the last lot of voodoos linux against win where nearly matched
regards
john
(a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
I like NVidia's approach, one GPU, instead of "as many VSA-100s as we can fit on a PCB!" I think that Alex Leupp desperately needs to rip those blinders off of his head.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Sig gnomes are similar to underpants gnomes; however, the sig gnomes steal signatures.
You're just jealous because you're too cheap to afford a 3D Prophet2 GeForce2 GTS 64mb card.
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Has anybody seen these benchmarks that show V5 beating GeForce2? I have a suspicion that those benchmarks are against the regular GF2 and not the GF2 Ultra. Given the significant perfromance boost, and the fact that 4 VSA100 chips will not be twice as fast as two VSA100 chips, it seems that GeForce2 Ultra may just beat V56K, or at least come damn close. If that's the case, 3DFx has no hope. The V5 is slated to sell at around $600, and with 4 chips and 128MB of (redundant) RAM, I don't see how they can pull the price down. To tell the truh, I'm very pissed of at 3DFx. What used to be the leader of 3D performance and quality has now degraded to making second or third rate products and trying to use market hype to sell it. Not only the sticker fiasco, but their purchase of STB and them artificially keeping Voodoo prices high. There used to be a time when perfromance freaks wouldn't be caught dead without a Voodoo, and all Voodoo2 cards automatically got a "kick ass" award in Boot magazine. Now, a performance freak wouldn't be caught dead WITH a V5 card, and MaximumPC doesn't even bother to review their cards.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
...is the input rates. 3D games that make use of motion (just about all do as far as I am aware) rely on framerate as a basis for input time slices - i.e. faster framerate = faster input response cycle.
/.
Play a racing game at 30 fps and you will be all over the road because you only have (for example - I've not coded the stuff yet so I don't know the actual stats) 30 times in a second that the computer accepts input.
Consider: you're heading for the rail on the left - you yank the wheel to the right; assume input ranges from 0 to 100 with 0 = hard left, 50 = center, 100 = hard right
At 30fps you have input at 50, then in LESS than 1/30th of a second you are at 100. NEXT FRAME the system acknowledges a hard right, possibly reeling you out of control.
At 60fps, VISUAL does not appear any different, but input is 50, 75, 100 and the game registers the 75, and you maintain control.
This is WAY simplified, but hopefully you can extrapolate the point.
I would appreciate if you'd excuse any amateur-ness to the post as it is my first on
If you want to use your car/finesse metaphor, the relatively new tile based texturing methods in cards like the Radeon may be representative. Tile based texture, when done properly, allows card manufacturors to not need truly ridiculous amounts of memory bandwidth. It will probably give us headway until some new memory tech comes along, because even DDR has its limits.
matt
You get a nice $600 space heater to heat your room on those cold winter nights. :)
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"Maybe, just once, someone will call me 'sir' without adding,'you're making a scene.'" - Homer J. Simpson
I think I'll call the local electrical coop and see how long it will take to have another transformer mounted near my house.
Don't you think it's time to start communicating?
Which is why I think they should come out with another standard. Like maybe a dual 300W power supply, with different adapters for certain situations. I know some people who Beowulf 2 computers together, and even run about a billion hard drives in the same computer. It could be useful for a bunch of diffeent applications, only prob is it wouldn't be cheaper to implement than the one they supply you with. Although it'd be a long term solution.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
AGP - Accelerated Graphics Port
It's not a multipoint bus like PCI, it's a port, like a serial or parallel port. The chipset would have to be designed to implement multiple ports to have more than one AGP slot. This would add quite a bit of complexity to the chipset. Adding complexity==lower yields==higher per unit prices. Not to mention that it would add complexity to the BIOS code.
That would be just while using it with memory rich graghics cards. If you put memory poor cards that use system memory for texture storage (like the i740 did) then you are looking at an order of magnitude more complex for video drivers, especially if you wanted to share the memory space between the 2 cards.
In the short term, forget it. You won't see multiple AGP ports on mainstream motherboards soon.
Some of the Intergraph/Intense3D/whatever-they're-called-this- week solutions do this already. Have a look here:http://www.intense3d.com/4210/4210data.asp
"Good people drink good beer"
There is a Quantum3D logo on the bottom left corner of the board photographed in the article. Quantum3D have been claiming to have boards based on lot's of VSA-100 parts for months so this doesn't say a lot about the general availability of the 6000 boards from high volume OEM's. FYI Quantum3D offer board sets with up to 16 VSA-100 chips in a single graphics system.
Shure as hell it will crach windows though:)
and maybe even linux....
We have not inherited the earth from our parents. We have borrowed it from our children.
Big deal. Most video cards have more RAM than my first PC-compatible had hard disk space :-) And I actually wrote college papers on it! Imagine that!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Seriously though, if this card needs more power than it can get from an AGP slot, then maybe they should just hook it up to the internal power supply
They did that with the 5500. The 6000 chews up about twice the power of the 5500--100W was the figure I heard bandied about. That's a lot of power for one component to be drawing from the power supply.
...same ad as I did while viewing the first picture (a shot of the card itself.)
... Accept no substitutes!"
"ATI Radeon
I thought that was pretty amusing.
Anybody remember how video cards worked on Indigo II's? It's been awhile since I opened one up but IIRC the motherboard had a riser card with EISA slots in back and some kind of other slot in front. SGI used parallel EISA slots to overcome the speed limitations of EISA. The entry level graphics card was 18"x4" and filled one slot, while the "Extreme" card filled 3 slots on the board... when the "Impact" series came out they even had to boost the power supply and run a direct power cable from the ps to the boards. Once again, the Max Impact took 3 slots, while the High Impact took and the Solid Impact one.
Here's a picture of an Extreme card. This is not my auction, btw... I just didn't feel right about deep linking to the picture and it's the only one I could find.
As a matter of abstract, ignorant speculation: how hard would it be to implement several modern AGP slots on a motherboard and plug in multiple cards either SLI fashion or SGI "extreme gfx/max impact" fashion? Or even better, would it be possible to build a video card which filled one AGP slot and had a second subcard which fit in one or two PCI slots? It seems like a relatively elegant solution to an ugly problem. At least, it seems like a really cool project, and better than using an external power source.
Rev Neh
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
Hopefully the delay in the release of the new Voodoodoo card was due to an effort by 3dfx to actually fix the bugs and make it work, unlike predecessors.
The reviews of the GeForce2 Ultra from Sharky Extreme benchmarks Q3 at 1600x1200 around 90 fps.
i a_geforce2_ultra/7.shtml
Check out http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/guides/nvid
Dozer
"The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they're going to be when you kill them."
Dozer
"The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they're going to be when you kill them."
The voodoo5 5500 has a 4pin molex connector for plugging into your PC's power supply, AGP cant supply enough power for 2 VSA-100 chips+64 meg 'o Ram. The V5-6000 needs 60w of power and 3DFX can't Guarantee your 'puters power supply , so they bundle one which will work with their cards, no 'My V5-6000 keeps crashing my PC' stories when people with 230w power supplies try 'em. Does make them a bit pricey though, and talk about an ineligant solution, both NVidia and ATI ( and possibly PowerVR-3, bit boys...OK maybee not them..) have much better solutions.
That thing's huge, so the milkmaid said to the vicar.
But seriously, it's got four bloody fans on it. Unless you had a reasonably large case, you'd have to upgrade your damn case to fit one in!
You might even have to change your motherboard - a lot of motherboards have DIMM sockets and IDE headers which would get in the way of that AGP card's tail.
To me, that seems like quite a good reason to _not_ get a Voodoo 5 6000. Don't even get me started on the external PSU!
Plus the heat! The heat! Apart from the four fans on the card in the test machine in those pics, there seems to be a fan at the back of the machine, and one at the front at the bottom - anyone get the feeling that these V5 6000's get a little "toasty"?
I friend of mine has a V3 3000 and boy does that little blighter get hot - imagine what four of them stacked on top of each other is going to generate?!
--
jambo
system.admin.without.a.clue
-- js.
Actually there are some really cool rendering engines that IBM had that were seperately cased. Lots of chips on a board that couldn't fit inside the standard cage. So if you want the power, you're going to have to make the sacrifice. But I wonder what bussing you would use to maintain the required bandwidth for and "outside the box" approach?
"a powerful and unexpected ally..."
I agreee that it is sad that 3dfx used to make seriously bitchin' hardware. Now the problem with 3dfx is price and performance value. Anyone remember that word? Value? It was when we didn't have to pay an extra $300 for what amounts to about 2 extra fps! 3dfx used to be the market leader in graphics accelerators, but if they don't pull their heads out of their asses then they'll get they'll be well and truly kicked by nVidia.
I mean seriously - who the hell would buy a graphics card that requires an external power supply!? There's only so much electricity in the friggin' world!
Self Bias Resistor
"Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
I think so Brain, but we'll never get a monkey to use dental floss."
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When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer our friend.
In what, Quake 3? Windows desktop? Incoming? Talk about a pointless comment. I've seen benchmarks for Q2 (admittedly at 1024x768) clocking several hundred fps(!) on an old Voodoo 2 SLI rig by completely downgrading the graphics settings.
In short, fps ratings mean nothing unless you know (a) the game in question, and (b) the config being used.
High performance, low price and low power consumption are conflicting goals; you have to make compromises.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
We've seen a few claims of 1024x768x32bit with 4X FSAA, but wait. Can it really be THAT fast? Now if my thinking is correct, the 6000 will be at best twice as fast as the 5500. And that will only be achieved when the rest of the system bottlenecks (namely CPU) are completely removed. So, if the Voodoo 5 5500 can't get 30 fps at 1024x768x32bit 4X FSAA, there should be no way in hell the 6000 can do the same but at 60 fps, right? I don't think the 5500 is that fast... Also, if I'm thinking right, the 5500 at 2X FSAA will always be exactly (err, close to) the same speed as the 6000 at 4X FSAA all else the same. Em.. Twice the speed of the 5500 isn't that fast unforunately. Almost sad considering the 1.4 gigapixel fillrate and 12 odd gigabyte bandwidth eh? I think I'll wait a few months for the NV20 or Rampage (if 3dfx is in business) and pay only $300 to the same thing. Actually I'll probably just get a Geforce 2 MX for $100 and say screw it all.
-Vic If you can't figure out my email, then don't.
This card is like a gas guzzling SUV that Slashdotters make fun of soccer moms for driving around town. Any card this piggy with the power doesn't belong on the market.
"...when the power supply gets kicked out of the socket?"
3dfx mentioned something about this in an interview of theirs (Sorry, no link handy). Apparently, the card will stop working, but there will be no damage to the card or computer.
NVidia is still releasing drivers for the TNT
But alas! They're still selling the original TNT chipset as well. That's not legacy support. Legacy support would be getting NVidia to release Windows 9x drivers for my NVidia-cloned Hercules 2000.
.sig: Now legally binding!
I spent $420 on my 3D Prophet2 GeForce2 GTS 64mb card. I bought that retail. You can pick it up for $50-$80 less online and other places. It's just a little less powerfull than the Voodoo5 6000 really. Oh yeah, did anyone mention the V5 6000 is about $600? Not only does it take up hella too much space, but it costs way more than it's worth. The V5 6000 is probably a furnace. If you want decent gaming, just get a GeForce2 MX. They're almost as good as the 3D Prophet2 GF2 GTS 64mb card, but hella cheaper. Below $200.
Remember when 3dfx was good? I wouldn't invest in 3dfx again. I'm all for NVidia now.
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Check out my blackbox styles
I don't expect the 6000 to be faster than a GTS Ultra at 640x480 say but at 1024x768 and above I wouldn't be surprised if it gave it a run for it's money.
I've still got a voodoo2 setup. Two of them SLI'd up. My framerate is essentially resolution independent from what I've determined so having 4-way SLI sounds good to me.
Not sure about the external power supply, it does sound dodgy in cases of kicking it out etc. but on the other hand my 235W power supply could do with some help so why not? Some sort of catch or clip perhaps to stop it getting accidentally removed?
A relevant write up which everyone may have seen already can be found in John Carmack's
-- "Sponges grow in the ocean. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn't happen."
Socket 7, K62-400, no fans. Not even on the power supply. Only noise is from the hard drive.
:)
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
No, it was at ECTS -- really. It was harldy a box product though, so it's open to question whether what was being shown there is in any way representative of something soon to be on a shelf near you.
You may remember Power VR series 2, first sighted back in the early Voodoo 2 era. It was demoed impressively on quite a number of ocassions, environment mapping and (for the time) high frame rates. But it was an awful long time until the Neon 250 was actually released (well over a year). The distraction of Power VR going in Dreamcast was a big influence there, but it's an example of how much can go on between a board being demoed and a product being sold.
The headline should read "3dfx's Voodoo5 6000 Still Alive".
Assuming, of course, that it is.
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"Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"
It's too high priced for all but the gamers with the deepest pockets (it costs more than some PC's!) and 3DFX doesn't really have any penetration into professional graphics (too many years w/o 32 bit 3D and supporting proprietary graphics libraries instead of OpenGL).
It's going to cost more money to produce than they'll make off of it (of course overall 3DFX loses money hand over fist, but they're being punished for it on the stock market).
I own a G-Force Annhilator Pro, and I am quite happy with it. I was just as happy with my old card, a Viper 550. It worked great, until Quake III came along.
Unfortunately, the GPU on my Annhilator Pro doesn't seem to do half the job it claims it does. It's like I just went from a V550 to a V770. Sure, I get some more frames, but in the end, not *that* many more to justify the 300$ starting gate tag.
Now, it seems every card is trying to move up in the world of GPU's. (Remember when it used to be RAM?) One chip, two chips, red chips, blue chips.
It reminds me of the 60's era with Muscle Cars. Just stuff a bigger engine into it, and it'll go "faster". That's fine when you're driving in a straight line. After that played out, you started to see cars with finesse. Cleanly designed engines that went with body styles. Smaller, faster, (ok, not cheaper).
The main problem is the speed at which manufacturers are expected to act. They constantly throw current development out the window to embrace the "new" tech, which in turn, just starts getting hot, only to be thrown out again when something "new" comes along.
This is unsettling. While Video cards continue to get faster and faster, they seem to shrink away from what would be called a "legacy" design. Unfortunately for them, they seem to have lost the ability to completely use a design before trading it in for a new one.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
Still sounds like nVIDIA's ahead with the GeForce Ultra, in terms of 3-d performance at least. Though unless you're obsessed with driving Quake's FPS as high is it will go, it's going to be a while before anyone's really going to need cards this powerful (and expensive).
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Only for 600 bucks. Your damn right it's gonna beat teh geforce 2, it better for a 600 doller price tag. Hell i want the the thing to tuck me in at night and read me bed time stories for that price. Is anyone besides me sick of paying outrageous prices for small porformance gains. 3dfx is not the only one, Nvidia with the Geforce 2 ultra is also guilty. At least 3dfx makes a product that will last a bit longer than Nvidia's. Hell i still got my voodoo 3 3000 and it still sorta rox.
thx
DOH... GeForce 256 is 256-bit not 256 MB of RAM.. guess I'm the dumbass.. hehe..
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
Honestly, How many of us here would need to worry about finding "another" surge protector and whether or not it would be the last thing needed to overload our home's circuit(sp?)?
My computer with its 5 external SCSI drives make enough noise and consume enough power as it is. Now I gotta add another device that basically does the same thing? man...
Video Cards are becoming so sofisticated that eventually, if not now, its like running a second computer within your main computer.
Seriously though, if this card needs more power than it can get from an AGP slot, then maybe they should just hook it up to the internal power supply. Might have to create a new standard in power supplies, but I am sure this isn't the only card that'll head this route. [Unless someone comes out with the notion that smaller is better, type of marketing, with another card]. Wouldn't surprise me though. Every time I upgrade I have to buy a new case, cause the old one is obselete.
I've got a 200W, 250W, 280W and a 300W, I have yet to get an ATX case. Still running the old P5A-B, with the AT 300W case. Still good. Refuse to upgrade until this Intel VS AMD pissing match is over (or atleast subdued).
I haven't seen any specs, but it would seem to me that the card will probably not need more than 12V, which is what it could get from the power supplies without any extra wires or soldering. And the power supply can handle it. I came across some old Aptiva speakers that use the computers internal power (instead of a plug, it has a 12V adapter port attached to it). To power them I just ran wires from the 12V leads inside the case to a jack I rigged on the back of the case. Works fine. And I think the same could be done for the Voodoo6 6000.
Come to think of it, I wouldn't be surprised if hardware sites came out with adapters for the
Voodoo6 6000, after it came out, to power the thing internally.
Just think if you were to accidently unplug your video card while your computer was running. I don't think it'd recover from that.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
when the power supply gets kicked out of the socket? 1 proc only? total failure? partial failure? burned card?