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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
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
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
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 ...
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
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 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."
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
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."
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.
People seem to have me a bit wrong here...I have nothing against the *concept* of a 3D user interface...I think we will indeed be there at some point. I do think that we're going to have to completely re-think the way we look at and represent data at a fundamental level. No half-assed attempt is going to cut it...I'm not even sure an open-source project will have the capacity to do it, unless by luck or the inclusion of some very good UI researchers.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
"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.
"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
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