Voodoo2
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The Voodoo2 (or Voodoo2) is a set of three specialized 3D graphics chips on a single chipset setup, made by
3dfx 3dfx Interactive, Inc. was an American computer hardware company headquartered in San Jose, California, founded in 1994, that specialized in the manufacturing of 3D graphics processing units, and later, video cards. It was a pioneer in the f ...
. It was released in February 1998 as a replacement for the original Voodoo Graphics chipset.


Architecture and performance

The card runs at a chipset clock rate of 90 MHz and uses 100 MHz EDO DRAM, and is available for the
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interface. The Voodoo2 comes in two models, one with 8 MB RAM and one with 12 MB RAM. The 8 MB card has 2 MB of memory per
texture mapping unit In computer graphics, a texture mapping unit (TMU) is a component in modern graphics processing units (GPUs). They are able to rotate, resize, and distort a bitmap image to be placed onto an arbitrary plane of a given 3D model as a texture, in ...
(TMU) vs. 4 MB on the 12 MB model. The 4 MB framebuffer on both cards support a maximum
screen resolution The display resolution or display modes of a digital television, computer monitor, or other display device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. It can be an ambiguous term especially as the displayed resoluti ...
of 800 × 600, while the increased texture memory on the 12 MB card allows more detailed textures. Some boards with 8 MB can be upgraded to 12 MB with an additional daughter board. Each of the three chips present on the card has its own 64-bit RAM interface, giving the card a "total" bus width of 192 bits or 800 MB/s per chip. The Voodoo2 has an increased chip-count compared to the original two-chip Voodoo card. Competing products such as the
ATI Rage The ATI Rage (stylized as RAGE or rage) is a series of graphics chipsets developed by ATI Technologies offering graphical user interface (GUI) 2D acceleration, video acceleration, and 3D acceleration developed by ATI Technologies. It is the ...
Pro,
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RIVA 128 The RIVA 128, or "NV3", was a consumer graphics processing unit created in 1997 by Nvidia. It was the first nVidia product to integrate 3D acceleration in addition to traditional 2D and video acceleration. Its name is an acronym for ''Real-time In ...
, and Rendition Verite 2x00 are single-chip products, each with integrated 2D GUI/VGA accelerators. As with the original Voodoo, the Voodoo2 is a dedicated 3D accelerator, and has to be used in conjunction with a conventional 2D graphics card. It requires an external pass-through VGA cable hooked up from the 2D card into the Voodoo card’s passthrough VGA port.Review AGP Graphic Cards
Tom's Hardware, October 27, 1997.
The Voodoo2's third chip was a second TMU that allows a second texture to be drawn during the same graphics engine pass, and thus with no performance penalty. At time of introduction, Voodoo2 was the only 3D card capable of single-cycle dual-texturing. Usage of the Voodoo2's second TMU depends on application software; ''
Quake II ''Quake II'' is a 1997 first-person shooter, first-person shooter game developed by id Software and published by Activision. It is the second installment of the Quake (series), ''Quake'' series, following ''Quake (video game), Quake''. Develope ...
'' and ''
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'' exploited dual-texturing to great effect. In games that did not use more than one texture layer, Voodoo2 is only faster than Voodoo1 because of its higher clock speed. The Voodoo2 introduced
Scan-Line Interleave Scan-Line Interleave (SLI) is a multi-GPU method developed by 3DFX for linking two (or more) video cards or chips together to produce a single output. It is an application of parallel computing, parallel processing for computer graphics, meant t ...
(SLI) capability to the PC market. In SLI mode, two Voodoo2 boards installed in a PC run in parallel, each unit drawing half the lines of the display. Voodoo2 SLI not only doubles rendering throughput, it also increases the total framebuffer memory, and thus the maximum supported screen resolution increased to an impressive (for its time) 1024 × 768. However, texture memory is not doubled because each card needed to duplicate the scene data. The original Voodoo Graphics also has SLI capability, but it is only used in the arcade and professional markets. In early 1999, 3dfx released the
Voodoo3 Voodoo3 was a series of computer gaming video cards manufactured and designed by 3dfx Interactive. It was the successor to the company's high-end Voodoo2 line and was based heavily upon the older Voodoo Banshee product. Voodoo3 was announced a ...
, which effectively replaced the Voodoo2 as the company's flagship product. The base model Voodoo3 2000 offers in a single card slightly greater performance than a Voodoo2 SLI + 2D card in some situations. The 3000 and 3500 models offers performance exceeding Voodoo2 SLI in certain environments. At the same time 3dfx also released the budget-priced
Voodoo Banshee 3dfx Interactive, Inc. was an American computer hardware company headquartered in San Jose, California, founded in 1994, that specialized in the manufacturing of 3D graphics processing units, and later, video cards. It was a pioneer in the fie ...
, a combination 2D/3D card that combines a 2D accelerator with an overclocked but incomplete Voodoo2, missing one of the texture units.Pabst, Thomas
New 3D Chips – Banshee, G200, RIVA TNT And Savage3D
, Tom's Hardware, August 18, 1998.
The Voodoo2 enjoyed remarkably long usage in many computer systems, as a Voodoo2 SLI setup was competitive with newer cards like
NVIDIA Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...
's RIVA TNT2,
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's Millennium G400, and even NVIDIA's
GeForce 256 The GeForce 256 is the original release in Nvidia's "GeForce" product line. Announced on August 31, 1999 and released on October 11, 1999, the GeForce 256 improves on its predecessor (RIVA TNT2) by increasing the number of fixed Graphics pipelin ...
. 3dfx's Glide API played an essential role in this longevity because some games were still tailored more towards Glide than
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or
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. Long after the chipset's obsolescence, some dedicated enthusiasts did get later games working with a Voodoo2, e.g. ''
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''.


Specifications

* Voodoo2 (V2 1000) 90
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clock (memory and core). * 135 MHz
RAMDAC A Brooktree RAMDAC A RAMDAC (random-access memory digital-to-analog converter) is a combination of three fast digital-to-analog converters (DACs) with a small static random-access memory (SRAM) used in computer graphics display controllers or ...
, dithered 16-bit (65536 color) display. * Full-screen, 3D-only accelerator, works with another 2D or 2D/3D VGA card through a VGA pass-through cable. Picture softened slightly by analogue VGA pass-through cable. * Support full-screen games under DOS, Windows 95/98, etc. * Support for game development tools including Gemini OpenGVS, Multigen, GameGen, SGI OpenGL, Glide, Direct3D, MiniGL and Autodesk 3D Studio under DOS, Win32 and IRIX. * Resolution up to 800 × 600 and higher resolution through SLI (Scan Line Interleave), up to 1024 × 768. * Supports 8 or 12 Megabytes high speed EDO DRAM rated at 100 MHz but running at 90 MHz, 25 ns. * RAM configured into 4 Megabytes for frame buffer(s) and Z-buffer and 4 or 8 Megabytes texture memory. * 90 million fully featured
pixel In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a Raster graphics, raster image, or the smallest addressable element in a dot matrix display device. In most digital display devices, p ...
s/sec sustained fill rate for bilinear textures, with LOD MIP-mapping, Z-buffering, alpha-blending and fogging enabled). * 3 million fully featured triangles/sec (Filtered, LOD MIP-mapped, Z-buffered, alpha-blended, fogging enabled, textured triangles). * 180 million pixel/sec with scanline interleaved configuration. * Bi-linear and tri-linear texture filtering. * Level of Detail (LOD)
mipmap In computer graphics, a mipmap (''mip'' being an acronym of the Latin phrase ''multum in parvo'', meaning "much in little") is a pre-calculated, optimized sequence of images, each of which has an image resolution which is a factor of two small ...
ping * Supports multiple textures per pixel. * Bump mapping through texture composition. * Edge anti-aliasing. * Hardware triangle set-up (independent strips and fans). * Perspective, sub-pixel and sub-texel correction. * Gouraud shading and texture modulation. *
Z-buffering A z-buffer, also known as a depth buffer, is a type of data buffer used in computer graphics to store the depth information of fragments. The values stored represent the distance to the camera, with 0 being the closest. The encoding scheme may ...
(16/32 bpp, integer and floating point). *
Alpha blending In computer graphics, alpha compositing or alpha blending is the process of combining one image with a background to create the appearance of partial or full transparency. It is often useful to render picture elements (pixels) in separate pass ...
and fogging. * Linear frame buffer access. * Single-pass tri-linear filtering. * Single-pass dual textures per pixel.


Models

* 1 VGA: Whether the card included a built-in VGA subsystem and ran as a standalone graphics card * 2
Texture mapping unit In computer graphics, a texture mapping unit (TMU) is a component in modern graphics processing units (GPUs). They are able to rotate, resize, and distort a bitmap image to be placed onto an arbitrary plane of a given 3D model as a texture, in ...
s:
render output unit In computer graphics, the render output unit or raster operations pipeline (ROP) is a hardware component in modern graphics processing units (GPUs) and one of the final steps in the rendering process of modern graphics cards. The pixel pipeline ...
s


References


External links


The Story Of The 3DFX Voodoo
{{Graphics Processing Unit 3dfx Interactive Graphics cards Products introduced in 1998