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Voodoo5 6000 Preview
Robert writes: "VoodooExtreme posted a hands-on preview of the mysterious 3dfx Voodoo5 6000 video card from the I/ITSEC (http://iitsec.org) Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference which comes equipped with the first-ever published benchmarks of Quake III. Formerly the Voodoo5 6000 was planned to be a retail product, but its high price tag and need for an external power supply led them to sell the rights to it to Quantum 3D, where it will be used in Visual Simulation industry..." I always thought a video card was a selling your video short ;)
Did they even test the nuclear power plant you need for it to work?
This is where I'd put my sig if I could be bothered to write one
Hooray for a fine company. I have no faith in 3dfx, but quantum has put together some fine machines, which despite the many fans on mine, aren't all that noisy. And I knew that external power supply wasn't necesary.
i thought 3dfx were getting out of the graphics card business and just making chipsets. but here they are releasing this.
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Never send a man where you can send a bullet.
Time to wake up now Cmdr.
Let's be honest here, when was the last time 3dfx had a leading edge product?
Was it the Voodoo5? Bzzt, no, sorry.
The Geforce2 GTS was released first and blew the 5500 out of the water in terms of frame rate. But that was OK, the Voodoo5 had FSAA and we'd pay for that. Then NVIDIA "leaked" drivers for the GF2 that had FSAA. No problem for 3dfx though, they'd produce a 4-chip Voodoo5 6000 and retake the frame rate crown. After showing the product at e3, they proceed to figure out that nobody will buy a card that's too damned big to fit in most cases.
How about the Voodoo3? That was pretty neat right? Unless you like 32 bit color, then you're screwed since 3dfx didn't think that competing with the features in the Rage128 and GF256 was worthwhile. The shareholders must have loved that.
How about the Banshee? What a deal! Inadequate 2d combined with the aging Voodoo2 chip but without SLI!! What were they thinking?
So yeah, 3dfx hasn't had a decent product since the Voodoo2. That's one fucked up company.
--Shoeboy
I concede on this point. Still, I know the technology is out there now. I just want to see it made available to the masses.
Here's something "GROUNDBREAKING" that you can do all by yourself without waiting on 3dfx: get a goddamned clue.
Replacing 2d gui's with 3d is like replacing keyboards with speach recognition - it sounds cool in sci-fi but sucks in the real world.
The nice thing about 2d is that everything is easy to find. You've got a desktop with some folders on it. The folders contain other folders. Assuming that you have "some" organizational skill, it's hard to get lost. Now consider a 3d gui - "Shit, I know the report I need is in here somewhere. Let's see, I go north for 20 paces and turn left at my resume. Then I go west until I reach my porn collection, up until I reach my unfinished novel and... There is is!"
Last I checked, nobody was using the term "usability guru" to refer to Gibson.
--Shoeboy
Try reading Anandtech, they had this yesterday. (-1, Heresy)
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Big cables for the power consumption, 4 (!) big fans to fight the heat: this looks like it has been assembled by some overclocker at home rather than a commercial product from a company that once ruled the 3d-market. Is this a joke? Will it fit in my case? Would I buy this? Yes, no, no ...
Some pretty harse words there. Try a keyword search. Instant correlation ... no one ever said that this sort of interface would mean that we need to abandon a text interface. Such a violent reaction to a simple and intuitive idea .... why?
Having rebooted 8 times in order to install IIS4.0
Hmm... Most of us insert the option pack cd, click 'setup' and reboot when it's done.
It's wonderful how the incompetent blame windows for their own shortcomings.
That's a key feature of Linux - the people who make it will tell you that you're a moron if you have to reboot every few hours. Microsoft won't since that would impact sales.
--Shoeboy
Forget the nuclear powerplant.... I would probably need another big-ass case fan just to keep that cool. I'm kinda sick of all these graphics cards with seemingly inadequate cooling techniques. I remember how hot my Leadtek TNT2Ultra used to get before it killed itself. I personally haven't used 3dfx since there first generation voodoo cards... and I honestly don't know anyone else who still uses them.
lim brain -> meltdown
Such a violent reaction to a simple and intuitive idea .... why?
Cause it's a bad idea and you felt the need to call it "GROUNDBREAKING". What's intuitive about it?
The idea of wandering around a 3d environment is appealing, but it's hard to imagine why a 3d virtual library would be simpler or easier to navigate than the 2d graphical representation of a hierarchial filesystem. The nice thing about your traditional folder browser is that you're limited to parents, children and siblings. There's no way to represent richer relationships between objects, but in a 3d system, there's no good way to manage and navigate those relationships. A virtual library is less useful than a virtual file cabinet.
A 3d gui would just be too hard to use.
--Shoeboy
Any 2-d representation can be mapped to 3-d space. Imagine that ... I might have had a few topology courses. However, the immediacy of a 3-d experience cannot be mapped to a 2-d environment. You do the math.
Any 2-d representation may be mappable to 3-d space, but do you actually think that the usability of the data will always come out at least or higher than the level it had as a 2-d representation? Remember that, when all is said and rendered, someone still has to be able to look at it.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
No usability is not the issue. The approximation of a real-world environment is. Do you dream in 2-d? Probably not. Yet your brain finds utility for a 3-d representation of this particular information space. Binocular vision (3-d perception) empowered predators to kill, feast, and develop larger brains (lots of extra protein means more grey matter). These are the scientific facts. You may spurn the idea that a 3-d representation of your information space empowers you. But mother nature, as always, will have the last word in this argument.
Just put the PC on an SBC card and mount it inside a video (appliance?) box.
I think usability is of great importance, seeing as how the interface must obviously be used. 3D representation is great when there is a clear spatial representation in more than 2 dimensions...like when your predator is chasing prey or when I'm shooting at someone in Quake.
What I was trying to say in my other post is that the problem with designing a 3D interface is not simply transposing a 2D concept into 3D space. We will have to come up with very new ideas for the representation of data and its relevance to other data. There is a good chance that the emphasis on text will have to be reduced. Text is a 2D creature. It flows in only 2 dimentions. Quite simply, I don't think anyone knows quite how to handle this beast yet. When someone does, I'll certainly want to give it a spin.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Monks in the dark ages replaced the non-dimensional human memory "interface" with a concept known as a memory palace. They used mnemonics to find their memories in a (presumably) three dimensional palace of dreams and thoughts. Location is one of the things we naturally key on. Consider if you will, our ability to follow driving directions. Would it be easier to say "Turn left on Abernathy terrace, right at Cleighton, and head north on Sunbury" or Turn left at the McDonalds, right at the water tower, and head towards Ender park"? I think linking to knowns would probably be a better interface to find things. YMMV, of course.
Lowmag.net
I'm agreeing with you on this. Beside, we haven't been able to figure out some good 3D UI yet. The best we have right now are 3D windows, which are 2D planes set in 3D space... Woohoo!! That's innovation. (!!!) What if I can do a 90 degree turn and see another part of my desktop? Isn't that the same thing as switching desktop under KDE or Gnome???
You cannot deny the ability of physical space to affect the human psyche. Witness the affect that a cathedral has on worshipers. The Masons base their doctrine on the ability of an environment around an individual to powerfully shape his or her thought processes. The Chinese understand this idea through Feng Shui. Get on board folks. The ride is sure to be interesting.
Page relationships are already adequately handled with 2D displays, either with scrolling or by an action that causes the next page to be displayed. You can't see the next page in a book until you turn to it...it's not a true 3D representation of the data.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
I have read a lot of opinions on this offtopic topic and just wanted to provide my two cents. A 3D interface can be beneficial to an OS even if it is just for the cool factor alone. Take for example the movie Johnny Mnemonic which in my opinion provided some very interesting ideas about how a 3D interface could be extremely beneficial. The first thing that I saw in this movie that struck me as beneficial was a password system based on an object much like a Rubik's cube but in a diamond shape. I was amazed at the simplicity of this idea, the user remembered and input a visual pattern instead of a word. Obviously this was a movie so there was no underling logic but I would imagine that this system would be based on underlining numbers or a bitmap comparison system instead of words. The second thing was a map system where the user would pull out a map touch a particular area and move to that area. This would be extremely useful for directions, city planning, existing building schematics, disaster relief, etc. etc. There are reasons that 3D makes more sense in certain scenarios but I do not think that an absolute 3D OS is the answer. I would hate to see a word processor implemented in 3D. I think a highbred of the two OSs would offer the best advantage.
Also, It was mentioned that 3D does not translate well onto a 2D monitor. I think FPS games discredit that argument. I would also like to note that a good stereoscopic headset these days retails for about as much as a professional 21" monitor and if a 3D interface was developed it would place a higher demand on headsets reducing there price even further.
Crack |
Why wime it only runs windows when you can actually have it preinstalled with Linux if you ask for it?
m
http://www.quantum3d.com/ittsec2000/periodic.ht
If you take all the crap out you can have it for as low as 1k, so where is the problem?
wiZd0m
What reason was there to actually review that V6000? If you could buy one for your own system I could understand a review.
Instead it did prove one thing, 3dfx is in deep shit. It proves what most people suspected, the card was being sold to the public because even after nearly 6+ months of work they can't make it work.
Reviewing it, as VE did, is the purest example of "mine is bigger than yours"
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
And I thought the 5500 card was impressive with 2 processors and 64Mb RAM.
What I dont understand is why they feel this is cost prohibitive, people spend $350 on a video card, and a high quality ELSA or similar card might push you into the $1000's, how much could this card cost that the normal consumer should't be able to buy it?
AF-Design, web development.
Damn, those Origin/Onyx 3000 boxes are sexy. I want some for my bedroom. If only they didn't need 220V 30A and a separate cooling system... oh, and there's the cost, too.
And if you want to see some REAL neat simulation stuff, forget the Voodoo 5 6000... check out the new 3D modeling table that SGI has developed.
Several people put on gloves and headsets and sit around a video table that's connected to a Big(tm) Onyx 3000 system. They're all able to manipulate the projection by moving it and they can see it in full 3D from any angle, hovering right above the table.
Now where's that URL... uh... try this http://www.sgi.com/virtual_reality/
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
I always thought a video card was a selling your video short
Understand jibberish not. Dotslash someone would please editor hire for.
Now consider a 3d gui - "Shit, I know the report I need is in here somewhere. Let's see, I go north for 20 paces and turn left at my resume. Then I go west until I reach my porn collection, up until I reach my unfinished novel and... There is is!"
Um, nobody says that a 3D GUI would obviate the same tools that already exist to locate information on a large system. I use 'find' and 'locate' on pretty much a daily basis to track down files buried deep in the directory structure.
My current 2D GUI has a 3x3 screen "Virtual Desktop" up in the corner, and it's not at all uncommon for me to have a dozen or so xterms open all at once. If I lose track of what I put where, I can instantly jump to any open application via the right click menu. For that matter, isn't the whole virtual/paging desktop metaphor an added dimension to the GUI? (think "dimension" in the sense of an array)
Honestly, I don't know whether a fully 3D (Quake style) GUI would be useful or not. I think that when we all have head-mounted displays that are as light as sunglasses, have built in motion sensors, and are easy on the eyes for long periods of use, that 3D GUIs will be perfectly useable and intuitive.
In the mean time, I can't say. I honestly don't know whether it makes any sense to model a VR-style 3D GUI that you can only interface with through a 2D monitor -- I've never really seen it tried -- but I don't think it makes sense to discount its usefulness just because the concept hasn't already been proven.
http://www.3dwm.org/frameset.html perhaps for those for a linuxular nature, and2 16&mode=thread), but hopefully enough people can be persuaded to do something, that this'll go somewhere and not get lost in the "development ran out of steam at 0.1.1" jungle.
http://floach.pimpin.net/dimension.shtml for those with windows.
Yes, I know that this has been mentioned here before (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/03/0917
I'd personlly be fascinated in seeing what 3dwm could do for the cause of making 'nix graphical interfaces more...uh..nicer, and Dimension? I'll give it a go sometime during the weekend.
Perhaps hell may freeze over and I might even write a review (yeah, right!).
Since the Slashcode seems to be obliterating my link in preview, here's a link:e force2ultra-04.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/00q4/001204/g
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The Voodoo3 was/is an ok card, especially if you run Linux. It's currently the best option for playing Q3 and UT in Linux, unless you want to run XFree4 and not have DGA mouse input, which IMO just plain sucks.
The only thing the V3 was missing when it came out was 32 bit color. But at the time, running in 32 bit color slowed things down way too much for most people. I never ran my TNT2 in 32bpp, it was just too slow.
But yeah, they sure are a fucked up company now. Their latest line of cards is the worst yet. Same price as competing cards with not even close to the same performance...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Check your facts. For it's time, the banshee was one of the fastest 2d cards around, next to the big bad matrox cards.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
"But yeah, they sure are a fucked up company now. Their latest line of cards is the worst yet. Same price as competing cards with not even close to the same performance..."
3dfx has recently dropped the price on V5-5500s quite a bit, although the change hasn't shown up at a lot of retail places. But, you can get one at Buy.com or Onvia for ~$175.00, and you can do even better if you happen to catch them during one of their free shipping specials, or with a coupon.
Ahh, yes... their very first 2D/3D card. Slower than a stock Voodoo 1 for 3D and slower than most other 2D cards for everything else. Made the pass-thru HD15 monitor ports on the Voodoo 1 look pretty good...
"It proves what most people suspected, the card was being sold to the public because even after nearly 6+ months of work they can't make it work."
Although I don't have confirmation of this, I believe the V5-6000 ran into a problem with certain motherboard BIOSes.
In the V5-5500, the two VSA-100 chips on board are both directly on the AGP bus. However, with 4 VSA-100s, the V5-6000 had to have a bridge chip in between the bus and the graphic chips. Bridge chips are actually pretty common with PCI devices.
However, certain motherboard BIOSes refused to recognize the bridge chip as an AGP device. The problem could have been fixed with a new BIOS flash, but unfortunately there were enough motherboards with the problem that they couldn't release a retail product that way.
I still use a 386 with 8 MB of RAM, and I want to get more fps in nethack.
sup
But then there was this:
3DFX Not Quitting Video Card Business
sup
I thought that this was just a joke, but apparently 3dfx is actually going in this direction.h tml
http://www.overclockers.com.au/images/v59000big.s
Sorry folks, if you are waiting for 3DFX to make a card with this chipset, you will wait forever. Anyone and everyone in the industry knows that 3DFX has pulled out of the card industry and is going back to just selling their chips to other companies. If a card ever comes out with this on it, it won't be made by 3DFX themselves. Besides, forget about this 3DFX crap and embrace the future with NVidia! Wake up people!
Though at first, I thought the sparc-like parallel CPU archetecture was kind of cool. But it has some serious flaws. First, there are some serious paracitic forces that impeed parallel operations.. Next it's like the NASA way of doing things.. Cost is irrelevant, we want 2, 3, or 5 way redundancy. Even if volume brings the chip cost way down, you still have to duplicate memory and controller connects, etc.
Next as far as I've been able to tell, taking a pseudo-multi-threaded application and throwing more [CG]PUs at it very quickly dies off. 64 processor SPARC machines work well mainly because they multi-task, not multi-thread. Rendering a single graphic scene is not multi-taskable, nor even multi-threadable. At best what you get is a heavy and independant pipelines coupled with SIMD operations.
As it turns out, The VSA requires a single-tasked/ single threaded stage in the pipeline that is a bottleneck for all chips. Namely the dividing and sorting of vertexes before distribution to the individual plane processors. Though a novel and "scalable" approach, this provides such over-head on low-end cards, that it can't compete with traditional archetectures. In fact, the more polygons a scene has, the slower the VSA architecture will go. This series is best suited for average numbers of polygons with incredible texture dependancies - which utilizes the BW and the scalability of the chips. Unfortunately, even for CAD/Graphics designs which Quantum seems to think they can sell to, you're going to need massive polygon counts. And unless their distribution / sorting stage scales well with the number of processors, this isn't going to be good for them.
This information I've deduced from the various pages on sharkyextreme, anandtech, and tomshardware. Specificly in relation to the ATI Radeon / nVida Detonator 3 drivers verses the infinite plains approach VSA takes.
-Michael
-Michael
I don't thinka anyone has posted this, but from what I gather from the 3dfx press releases and interviews is that they will/have shut down their plant in Mexico. They will then sell the plant to someone and then contract someone to make the boards.
....
They said that they would in no way sell their chips to other card manufacturers (ie Creative..) They just won't be making the actual boards anymore.
I think we had something on TBA Central that talked about the plans and the press releases. Check it out.
I'm a little teapot short and stout
You know that isn't the correct way to install IIS. You need to install it, reboot, install service pack, reboot, (RLR), install hotfixes, reboot, (RLR), configure, reboot (RLR).
If you look in the Knowledge Base, there are several papers on installing IIS. Read one, please.
Has anyone bothered to look at the benchmarks realistically? We're talking 60fps out of this card... That's pathetic - Go and pick up MaximumPC's magazine from last month where they reviewed the GeForce 2 Ultra w/ 64MB 230mhz ddr. That card will do 94 frames per seccond on their test system which is an 800 Dell, i believe. And it costs $500.
If you want stellar image quality, go to best buy and pick up the ATI all-in-wonder radeon card - $300. It performs close to the Gforce - upwards of 80fps in qaver benchmark, does DVD playback 2 shades shy of a decoder card, and the image quality is stellar.
These for under $500 - whereas this card looks to cost $600-$800 minimum. Not a good cost-performance ratio. And i have a voodoo3 3000 in my computer now, i've been a fan of the company because of stability and driver support - i've had great luck.... but this is silly.
And WHY THE HELL is it an AGP card? I didn't think AGP could address 2 devices well, let alone the 4 chips that are on this thing. I thought the rumor was that it was going to have to be a PCI card so that it could address the 4 chips. Which wouldn't have mattered, since FSAA doesn't take advantage of sidebanding and other AGP features...
Oh well, down and out
zero
dune rox my ass...
insert clever line here
sig?
I parsed that sentence with emphasis on card. "I always thought a video /card/ [as opposed to a big rackmounted behemoth] was selling your video [potential] short."
Well, Voodoo5 prices have come down (as everyone knew they would) and I just picked up a retail Voodoo5 online for $170.00 flat to replace my Geforce 256. I tried a Radeon 32MB first, but returned it and went Voodoo5 instead.
Why did I do this? What does this get me? A reasonably fast card at a similar price point to nVidia and ATI offerings with two important benefits:
So, I went from Voodoo3 -> GeForce -> Radeon -> Voodoo5 in the space of a couple of months and now I'm satisfied again.
Here's hoping 3dfx is around for my next upgrade, too.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW