3dfx Voodoo4 / Voodoo5 Comdex 99 Preview

Although the chips are identical, all Voodoo4 series products will feature just a heatsink, while the Voodoo5 series gets a heatsink and fan. The heatsink is sufficient, but this just gives Voodoo5 users a little more piece of mind as 3dfx received quite a few complaints about the Voodoo3 overheating due to the lack of a fan. It turns out that the majority of these problems were traced back to the motherboard providing insufficient power to the graphics card.

AnandTech has noted this issue in the past as well. With a multiple chips drawing 13-16W each, the problem is only exacerbated. Even AGP Pro’s enhanced power handling ability is not sufficient. Fortunately, 3dfx has come up with a fairly elegant solution. All dual chip boards will feature a power connector, which you can see if you enlarge the picture of the 5500 AGP, that connects to a standard 4-pin drive connector.

The quad chip board, the 6000 AGP, will use an external 100W power supply that 3dfx has named "Voodoo Volts." Power will still be a problem for single chip boards on any motherboards that had trouble with a Voodoo3 or TNT2 Ultra. Just to be clear on this issue – this is the fault of the motherboard manufacturers not meeting the AGP power guidelines and not the fault of the video card manufacturers.

Notice that 3dfx has not forgotten the PCI market, which is actually quite large for the add in board market where 3dfx is the leader. So many new PC’s are coming with i810 chipsets or other integrated graphics solutions that have no AGP slot on the motherboard. The CPU’s on these systems may be quite powerful, but the graphics solution lacking somewhat. A large number of these consumers will eventually want to upgrade to much more powerful graphics solutions and 3dfx is looking to capture a large portion of this market as NVIDIA and Diamond/S3 are largely ignoring PCI products. The popularity of PCI add in boards is evidenced by the PCI Voodoo3 sales, which are almost the same as the AGP version.

You may have noticed in the shot of the 6000 AGP an Intel chip onboard. This is an AGP to AGP bridge that is necessary to prevent loading down of the AGP bus. 3dfx found that they could work around the loading issue with just two chips, but not with four. Hence the lack of said chip on the Voodoo5 5000/5500.

Also note that 3dfx has played around with the T-Buffer and determined it would not be an effective solution on a single chip board. The reasoning is that for the effects to look good, four samples are necessary, but a single chip can only do two at once. Furthermore, a single chip simply does not have the raw power, in terms of fillrate, to handle any of the T-Buffer effects. When probed, 3dfx did say that it may be possible to enable such effects through a registry hack, but there would be no reason to do so as the result would not look that good and would run quite slow. Thus, do not play on using T-Buffer on a Voodoo4 4500 card.