So, once again, let's break it down for you. Here's a modified list of the 'original' 3D feature set. After our visit last week to STB's Dallas HQ, we learned that a few of the original specs have now been 'erased' (see below).
3D Feature Set
- 8 million triangles/second and 366Megatexels/second fill rate for the Voodooo3 3500 at 183MHz
- 7 million triangles/second for 333Megatexels/second fill rate for the Voodoo3 3000 at 166MHz
- 100 billion operations/second
- 128-bit 3D acceleration
- Dual, 32-bit texture rendering architecture
- Multi-texturing. 2 textures/clock cycle (great for Quake2 and realistic lighting/shadow effects)
- Full Hardware Setup of triangle parameters
- Support for multi-triangle strips and fans
- Single Pass, Single-cycle bump mapping
- Single Pass, Single-cycle tri-linear mip-mapping
- Sub-pixel and sub-texel correction to 0.4x0.4 resolution
- Per-pixel atmospheric fog with programmable fog zones
- Floating point Z buffer (W buffer)
- True per-pixel, LOD MIP mapping with biasing and clamping
- Highly accurate LOC calculations
- Texture composting for multi-texture special effects
- Support for 14 texture map formats
- 8-bit palletized textures with full bilinear filtering
- Texture compression through narrow-channel YAB format
8-tap anisotropic filtering was one of the features on the original list of specifications but was dropped by 3Dfx. Not that anistropic filtering is all that important- it's main use is for depicting strands of hair, for example. It's a method that looks great but in practice hits the performance way too hard (something that 3Dfx is philosophically against, rather adamantly so). Another feature that was taken off the original spec sheet is full scene polygonal anti-aliasing. As great as it looks (in terms of smoothing out those jaggy edges), 3Dfx felt the performance hit was, again, too great. Other than that, the 3D core is very capable, much the same as the Voodoo Banshee in terms of the image you get. Of course with its dual TMU architecture, the Voodoo3s images fly at similar speeds to a Voodoo2 SLI rig.
