3dfx V 56000 at Comdex ?

[del42sa]

Hello,

I remember article about 3dfx Voodoo 5600 early preview back in year 1999 -2000. They showed "Voodoo 5600" with Pentium III running Quake 3 Arena at 1600x1200 with 32 bit colour, maximum texture detail and trilinear filtering - all the bells and whistles.The game was also running with four sample anti-aliasing enabled at 60fps. But then later somebody proved, that it was tweaked bios and inside was actually Quantum3D board, because 3dfx didn´t finish board design yet and with Intel bridge chip the card was unfunctional.

I am not sure if it was at Comdex or ECTS computer games trade show.My question is, what graphic card was used instead of Voodoo 5600. I just can´t remember. All I konw it was some Quantum 3D board with 3dfx chips on it.

Perhaps AAlchemy 4116 ( it uses 4 Voodoo 3 chips in sli, but Voodoo 3 wasn´t able of 32 bit output and they claimed it was 32bit color in Quake test)




thanks for info


Daniel

[goriath]

Hi Daniel,

Not sure about that, but your statement make me think to AAlchemy QX 4232A system from Quantum3D. It was effectively equipped with Voodoo5 6000 board; Q3D never sold this system, but it was assembled as demo machine in trade show for people, in order to show VSA-100 SLI technology acquired from 3dfx.

[del42sa]

yes it was Q3D board but definately not Voodoo 5600.... At that time 3dfx had only first revision with Intel bridge chip and that revision was non-functional. I guess they used Quantum 3D Mercury with hardware FSAA for Quake III Arena presentation and they just change name in bios for Voodoo 5600...



http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/q3d_mercury_faq.htm

http://www.anandtech.com/show/413/6

What it all boils down to is that 3dfx does not actually have working silicon back at this point in time. All they could tell us is that they are "eagerly awaiting" their first samples. At Comdex, they were still showing T-Buffer demos using Quantum 3D's 8-way Voodoo2 SLI setup.