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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 ?)
There is already a much better 3d video card out there... Go and check it!;-)
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
Read the article.
It won't be long before the CPU is a card in a PCI slot on your ATX videoboard.
bp
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
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
Well I do. My Iiyama VisionMaster Pro450 can do 1920x1440 according to the spec sheet, and I suspect a bit of modeline tweaking may persuade it to go a bit higher than that. It's not even that expensive. I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a decent monitor.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
It is partially shared by the CPU and the video card. Anything that involves calculation of object positions, their trajectory, collision detection, ect is going to eat into your CPU time. So if you are in the thick of a battle, 12 grenades are on the floor, 3 rockets in the air, 3 players, and 80 nails all of that is going to be eating CPU. This is going to slow down your FPS. Conversely if you are in a scene that is intense with texture and effects it'll slow you down.
So you are right, you want to be pushing more than 60 fps in a still scene so that when you hit action scenes you are still at perceived human maximum. I meant to imply that the fps did not drop below 60 during intense processing scenes, meaning obviously that the fps will be a lot higher most of the time.
V
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.
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
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...
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
No, *you* missed the point. A monitor isn't limited to the resolutions it claims on the box. It's an analog device, and can be run at whatever resolution you want so long as it's within spec. I'd like to run my monitor here at work at 1280x1024, but the refresh rate is too low. The next standard resolution down (1152x864) gives me the refresh rate I want, but it's too small. As a result, I devised my own resolution, and hence I'm running at 1232x944, which is nearly as good as 1280x1024, but it gives me a good enough refresh rate that it doesn't hurt my eyes. There's no reason whatsoever that I shouldn't run my Iiyama at 1600x1400. In fact, having done some quick modeline calculations, it looks like I can do it at around 85Hz, so I may well do that tonight, to give me that little bit extra screen real estate. See the XFree86 Video Timings HOWTO for more details.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
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.
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.
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.
Actually a good point, motion picture and television (US) are pretty close to the same frame rates and it's nothing perceptible beyond that. More importantly: with that extra horse power I should be able to render more quality rather than going beyond 30 raster scans per second. Benchmarks are possibly attempting, by some skewed view, to demonstrate this. (more fps == better images at 30 fps)
.8 gazillion pixels. Sure, that'd be cool, but then you'll need the memory, bus, etc. to deliver that much stuff to the card - or - [Please wait for graphics to be loaded into 3dZilla - 11 Sec. remaining]
I think we're hitting the end of the curve for this sort of thing, unless we zap out and buy the latest Phillips TFT wall display at 1.6 gazillion pixels X
Time to make the games better, IMHO.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
So that's why I'm always compelled to buy Fritos, Coke and McDonald's food after playing Star Wars pod racer...
Clearly this could be used for no good!
<flash>Buy Big Bob's Colostomy Bags</flash>
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Dude. "scalable?" The card extended into the tape bay! That is extreme overkill. What now are hardware manufacturers going to start selling their own cases with the card? I can see it now:
"Try our Brand new, slightly larger, super duper state of the art ethernet cards can do 100gigs a second!"
Disclaimer:Sun Microsystem Ultra Sparc computing system required to hook up card to your pc.... sold seperately.
Sig it.
The motivation is that the PCI-internal power lines are too weak to support the card. And I suspect that it is indeed a separately plugged cable. As for video cards getting their own case, they exist and are called "SGI workstations"...
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Well, you could also ask the point of high resolutions. If you're playing on your (high res) computer screen, 50-60 fps is pretty good. From 80 and up isn't too useful as it usually exceeds the refresh rate anyway.
I plan to plan / Dutch course in The Hague
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
"...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!
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.
Does anybody see this as being a bit silly/messy? I mean I already have about 20 things plugged into a wall socket, why do I need to add another thing?
The size of the card would also be my issue. That sucker is HUGE!!! That sucker goes from one side of the case to the other! No mo room! I wouldn't be suprised if it came with drip trays and was endorsed by George Foreman. Just a LITTLE to big IMHO, but I'm sure some hardcore games will readily saw their cases in have and install an Airconditioner for it.
Sig it.
The headline should read "3dfx's Voodoo5 6000 Still Alive".
Assuming, of course, that it is.
--
"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.
I believe I saw somewhere that the human eye cannot perceive anything above around 60-70 fps. So, the world around us would be felt at around 65 fps, give or take a number of conditions.(Somebody correct me if I'm wrong about this. Even if I am, the next paragraph still applies.)
High speed, addicted gamers need 'real world' conditions to play in. If they are in the middle of a very fast battle with action flying all around, they can't afford to cut their world down to half the frame rate. You'll be missing half of the detail. Good first person shooters use insane sensativity on their controls, meaning maxing out that fps very quickly. If you've got a high fps you can execute a quick 180 degree turn and see everything WHILE you are turning, possibly tossing off a rocket mid turn. Lower your fps and you might have missed your opponent, lower your resolution and you have the same problem because of 'pixel mud'
Seems insane, but you gotta understand the addicted gamer before it makes sense.
V
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.
:)
Ah, moderated down. There are some things that geeks just do not want to have pointed out, apparently
Overall balance between power consumption and computing power is getting to be more and more important. Heck, I have a 400MHz machine that I use for heavy duty compiling and I have absolutely no complaints about speed. If I really, really wanted my machine to seem faster, I'd switch to a faster compiler. Using Object Pascal is tempting, because it is compiled on order of 100x faster than Visual C++. Or, I could switch to using an interactive environment (e.g. Lisp, Smalltalk), so I don't have to worry about compilation time at all. Or I could get a compiler that's three times as slow and upgrade to a machine that's twice is fast. Hmmm...what am I missing here?
At the same time, there are people willing to have The Ultimate Graphics Card, even if they need to hook it up to a car battery and use a '75 Pinto for a heat sink. Is that wasteful in the same way that people drive four wheel drive vehicles in Dallas or Chicago because of the free-spirit image? Yes, of course it is. Let's not fool ourselves.
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?