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When 3dfx initially announced the Voodoo3 3500, I will admit to being a bit underwhelmed. Although it featured an ultra-high 183 MHz clock rate, the only other feature of notice was support for LCD displays. With the high price and low market penetration of LCD monitors, this added feature wasn’t exactly going to be huge factor for most gamers. Thankfully, 3dfx went back to the drawing board and lost the LCD feature in favor of some multimedia extras and enhanced video capabilities. Essentially, all the functionality of the STB Desktop TV has been added to the Voodoo3 3500 while still maintaining its 183 MHz speeds.
As you progress through the Voodoo3 line-up, you’ll notice that each successive model not only adds speed, but extra features as well. The Voodoo3 2000 was a vanilla card clocked at 143 MHz and intended mainly for the cost-conscious market that wants price/performance value over any sort of frills. The Voodoo3 3000 went a bit further than the 2000, offering a 166 MHz clock speed along with TV-out functionality. With the Voodoo3 3500, 3dfx has given us a 183 MHz card and included just about every multimedia feature in the book. Every card has been a definite improvement over the previous one and 3dfx has definitely topped themselves with the Voodoo3 3500’s combination of features and all-out 3D power.
The A/V components puts the Voodoo3 3500 firmly in competition with cards like the ATI All-in-Wonder Pro and Matrox Marvel, as well as the hard-to-find Asus AGP-V3800/TV TNT2 board. To be in this class, the board must have A/V extras like a TV-tuner, FM-tuner, video-in/out, audio-in/out and the functionality for video capture, editing and display. What’s interesting about the Voodoo3 3500 is that it’s not just a viable A/V solution, but it’s also one of the fastest 3D cards you can buy. This puts it in the enviable position as a true one-card solution for both gaming and home multimedia use, making it an extremely attractive board for both markets.
8 million triangles per second
366 megatexels per second fill rate
100 billion operations per second
128-bit 3D acceleration
Dual, 32-bit texture rendering architecture
True multi-texture support (2 textures per-pixel, per-clock)
Full hardware triangle setup
Single pass, Single-cycle Bump mapping
Single pass, Single-cycle trilinear filtering
Sub-pixel, Sub-texel correction w/ 0.4x0.04 resolution
Per-pixel atmospheric for with programmable fog zones
Floating point Z buffer (W buffer)
True per-pixel LOD MIP mapping w/ biasing and clamping
Texture compositing for multi-texture and special FX
8-bit palletized textures w/ full bilinear filtering
Texture compression through narrow channel YAB format
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