Voodoo 2 Press Release Leak Confirms Specifications

Chip designer 3DFX Interactive will officially put an end to speculation about the Voodoo 2 Graphics chipset with a detailed announcement Monday morning. Diamond Multimedia will also announce its intention to be among the first to ship a retail product based on the Voodoo 2.

Details of the Voodoo 2 architecture outlined in a 3Dfx press release, a draft copy of which found its way online, gave the specs:

– 3 million triangles per second
– 90 million dual-textured, bilinear filtered, per-pixel MIP-mapped, alpha-blended, Z-buffered pixels per second
– 192-bit memory architecture
– 2.2 gigabyte-per-second memory bandwidth
– 50 billion operations per second

With the Voodoo 2, 3Dfx brings two key technologies from the arcade side of its business to its consumer side. First, the Voodoo 2 will feature two texture processing units instead of one. That means a Voodoo 2 board will be able to simultaneously apply two textures to each triangle for single-pass, single-cycle rendering of effects such as trilinear filtering, lighting, spotlights, and image details. And what that means, according to 3Dfx’s press release, is that the Voodoo 2 will run GLQuake at the jaw-dropping rate of 110fps at resolution of 640×480 pixels.

The Voodoo 2’s second arcade feature will enable consumers to install two Voodoo 2 boards in a single PC. The chipsets will automatically detect each other and begin operating in a mode 3Dfx calls “Scanline Interleave.” In S(L)I mode, one chipset draws the even scanlines of a frame while the second chip draws the odd scanlines. This reduces each chipset’s workload by half, and allows each card to run at twice its normal speed. In this parallel configuration, the combined boards boast an astounding 384-bit memory architecture with memory bandwidth of 4.3 gigabytes per second to deliver 180 million pixels per second.