San Jose, California based 3Dfx Interactive has introduced a souped up version of its Voodoo 3D graphics chipset offering, it claims, a three fold performance advantage over current products. Designed to support 3D games and resolutions up to 1024 x 768 the new Voodoo2 chipset will allow games such as id Software’s Quake and Quake 2 to run upwards of 110 frames per second, claims the company. Voodoo 2 will not only change the way people play games but the way that people design games said Greg Ballard president and CEO of 3Dfx Interactive. The Voodoo 2 chipset, retailing at under $300 has an expandable architecture with a base configuration of an 192-bit memory architecture and 2.2 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth, delivering over 50 BOPs (billions of operations per second.) This configuration, according to the company delivers an incredible, tongue twisting 3 million triangles per second and 90 million dual textured, bilinear- filtered, per-pixel MIP-mapped, alpha-blended, z-buffered pixels per second. (90 million pixels per second for short.) For serious gamers, two Voodoo 2 boards can also be fitted together for even faster game play. When two boards are used together, Voodoo 2 automatically detects a second chipset and will being operating in Scanline Interleave (SLI) mode, where the first chipset draws the even scanlines of a frame while the second chipset draws the odd, reducing the amount of work per chipset by half and allowing each card to run at twice the speed. This high- end configuration expands to a 384-bit memory architecture with 4.3 gigabytes per second memory bandwidth, achieving an amazing 180 million pixels per second.
