Lookie at what I just dug up on the business wire. 3dfx has just sent out the press release that they are open sourcing their Glide API. Here is the full press release which should interest a number of you. Let the '3dfx is going down in flames' thread begin.

3dfx Interactive® Inc. today announced that the company is Open Sourcing its Glide® application programming interface (API) and releasing hardware specifications for all its currently shipping 3D hardware accelerators. By Open Sourcing Glide and releasing the specifications, 3dfx is enabling software developers and the Open Source community to better develop, support, and maintain drivers for 3dfx products across a variety of delivery platforms.

Hot Hardware has an interview with both Brian Burke and Peter Wicher of 3dfx talking about VSA-100 chip that will be used in the new Voodoo 4 and 5 product line.

Just in time for Quake3, 3dfx has finally released some new drivers for their Voodoo2 cards that are DirectX7 compliant.

BJorn3D is taking a look at the 3dfx Voodoo4/5 announcement from a while ago. We should be seeing those cards on shelves in um.. ok, a few months away still. Thanks to VoodooExtreme for that link.

Billy spotted this post on the Nihilistic messageboard talking about Vampire and the whole D3D versus Glide thing when they switched over tech.

3dfx has some new Voodoo3 drivers, the 3dfx drivers have another update to their OpenGL ICD (dunno how performance is). Some people are telling me this is the same version with just an updated installer though, so who knows.

Couple of quick driver updates to round out the evening, 3dfx has some new Voodoo3 drivers, and Matrox has some new G400 drivers. The 3dfx drivers have another update to their OpenGL ICD (dunno how performance is) and supposedly the Matrox guys did something strange with their GL driver as well.

Voodoo Extreme has posted an interview with 3dfx's Peter Wicher, talking about the VSA-100.

TargePC has an interview with Quantum3D talking about their fast-as-hell Voodoo5 based card. Here are a couple of pics of the card I got a hold of earlier.

The guys at IXBT Labs have an in depth look at the Voodoo4/5 stuff on the way from 3dfx early next year which should make for some good evening reading. On top of that Mark Shale sent me a pair of images of the Quantum3D AAlchemy card based on the new chipset sporting more than a few of those new VSA-100 chips. Check out [shot1] and [shot2]

The guys at 3DGN are taking a long hard look at the new 3dfx chipset announced a little while back and giving their 2 cents.

There's an interview with the new 3dfx CEO Alex Leupp on the Gamers Depot as well as Thresh's Firing Squad.

The guys at 3dfx have named their new CEO after the last one resigned. Dr. Alex Leupp. Thanks Haakon Larsen.

This is the one I've been waiting on, AnandTech takes a look at the recent Voodoo4/5 announcement and gives his assessment of the cards. Mr. Andrawes takes a look at the different clock speeds, as well as points out a few interesting things:

The first AGP card in the Voodoo5 line up is the 5500, which is much like the 5000 PCI with an additional 32MB of memory and an AGP interface. The increased bus transfer rate and onboard RAM serve to enhance performance as game complexity increases.All this will cost you $50 more than the 5000 PCI, primarily to pay for the additional RAM. If RAM prices drop, expect the cost difference between the boards to also drop.  [ed: price comes out to $279 for this board, and has double the fill rate of a V3 3500]

The Voodoo5 6000 is definitely the mother of all graphics cards with easily the highest fillrate of anything available at its launch. With 128MB of RAM, texture space should not be a problem as this card will have more RAM than many systems have. 3dfx is shooting for 85 fps at 1024x768x32 in Quake 3 with full scene anti-aliasing enabled - not too shabby.

A lot of people seemed to have focused on the V5-6000 and it's $600 price tag, not even realizing the V5-5500 is coming out at a closer to reasonable (by hardcore gamer standards) $279. Considering the 32bit color support and massive fill rate, a V3-5500 in 2-3 month from now seems like a reasonble purchase.

Not a whole lot going down for the evening, if you're extra bored you can check out the 3dfx financial report as well as this VE article talking about the supposed demise of 3dfx. It's more of that T&L chest beating stuff which will certainly entertain the hardware buffs out there. My 2 cents, no single graphics card will dominate the market for 2 years anymore the market is a different place now. To draw such radical conclusions from the Voodoo4/5 announcement just boggles my mind. Of course that was the intent of the article to generate a response though eh? While we are on the 3fdx kick, Beyond3D has an explanation for just what the heck that Intel chip is people were wondering about in this picture of the Voodoo5 from Scott Sellers:

The purpose of the chip, according to Scott, 'is to isolate the AGP bus from the 4 chips on the V5 6000.  We need electrical isolation on the design, otherwise we would have too heavily loaded an AGP bus slot.  The Intel part serves as a bridge between the AGP bus and the 4 rendering engines...'

Oh, also Paul Steed sent me a few more videos for you guys showing off himself doing motion capture and then how it was plugged into a Quake3 character. Really pretty darn interesting. Gotta wait for the FTP situation to stabilize on that one though so we'll just shoot for tomorrow on that stuff.

update Jack Want my opinion on that article?  Too bad, you're getting it anyway :-)  For one, I love how press is really taking the T&L issue and running with it.  Is it important?  Yes.  Is it necessary yet?  That remains to be seen.  Until the technologies converge, developers will still have to write for people without T&L for awhile now, and that's not going to change.  At the same time, developers can't just cater to only a T-Buffer environment either.  And they simply don't have time to implement lots of either.

At the same time, 3dfx is going for some pretty high price points, but in the end that doesn't really matter either, as they're apparent stunning success in retail has still left them losing money overall.  The real issues about 3dfx at the moment have nothing to do with technology or retail pricing strategy, it has simply to do with the internals of the company trying to find and maintain a profitable business model in an industry where they're no longer the darling.  If technology were indeed the limiting factor, ATI would not be winning this war handily.  If retail really mattered right now, then 3dfx would be out on top.

But then again, there is the point brought up in the article about the juggernaut that is Glaze3D.  And that, my loyal readers, was sarcasm.

A couple of new versions of WickedGL, OpenGL accelerator drivers you can use for your 3dfx card have been released. You have to register first to download them, but word has it these are a fair bit faster than the drivers 3dfx releases. Thanks VE & Reverend.

Honestly I think the Voodoo4/5 cards are going to be pretty damn good, but take a look at this auction for a bit more pessimistic view.

A bit more info on the Voodoo4&5 announcement from 3dfx today. Make sure and check out the www.3dfx.com and www.3dfxgamers.com websites for all the lowdown. GA-Source attended a press conference early this morning held by 3dfx and have posted their report. Here is a bit more clarification on the prices of the cards when they become available early next year:

The price/performance is also good at this point, as the dual chip version, the Voodoo 5 5000 PCI will retail at $229 and the AGP version at $299. Both providing you with higher frame rates, better graphics performance, better support for D3D, OpenGL and Glide, and of course – a better gaming experience.

You can also check out these images from Well-rounded showing off the image quality of the Voodoo5 running Quake3.

loony noticed that 3dfx's site has been updated with news on their new technology that they'll be talking about at Comdex. They have all sorts of content up at 3dfxGamers.com with interviews and screenshots and a shockwave movie on the main page that seems to have the goal of inducing seizures. Here's a snip from the Q/A session with Scott Sellers:

3dfx: Why is a higher fill rate better than hardware accelerated geometry right now?

S: The reality is that games will have to be completely re-written to take full advantage of T&L. Of the games that you can play between today and the beginning of next year, only 1-2% will use T&L in any form.

Developers have a very difficult decision to make right now, because they have to worry about the size of the market for any game that they have to create. As hardware abilities increase, the gap between low-end and high-end systems has grown dramatically. Developers now have to scale their games for a very wide variation of geometric complexity. This is a substantial technology hurdle to overcome in order to span the gaming sector. Publishers want their developers to maximize the total market, not simply hit a few hard core people on the high end.

Games that use T&L will come, but it’s going to be slow to evolve. By giving the developers insane fill rates, it’s easier for them to make their games run faster and look better. Evangelizing greater fill rate and full-scene anti-aliasing and getting developers to put support into their games immediately is trivial because they all want it. Roughly speaking, you can’t take advantage of hardware T&L for about 90% of today’s games, whereas with Voodoo5 you get an immediately advantage for all the content out there. As a result, the “out of box” experience for people that buy Voodoo5 is absolutely tremendous.

Jack's opinion: Of course, the argument for T&L and against fill rate is surprisingly similar - We'd really like transform engines to push complex scenes and do skeletal blending, and we still have to scale our games for a variety of fill rates. The hard truth is that we can't go too far either way until technologies converge and more people actually upgrade to the high geometry or high fill rate cards. 3dfx does have one advantage though in that full scene AA can happen no matter what without a game developer's intervention, so at least that part of their technology is a step ahead with no work from game developers.

Well check this stuff out, some specs on the soon to be announced Voodoo4 & 5 cards from 3dfx have in a press release from the Europe3dfx page, also more details seem to be popping up around that cant really be confirmed. Here you guys go. check out this press release that showed up on the Europe 3dfx web page.

The Company also announced the Voodoo4™ and Voodoo5™ board products based on the VSA-100 processor. Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 are expected to ship in March, 2000.

At the heart of the VSA-100 is a new advanced 3D engine which enables extremely high fill rates. Sustaining high fill rate is critical to deliver real-time frame rates at high resolution, with significant depth complexity, digital effects and the highest visual quality. For the consumer market, products based on the VSA-100 deliver from 333 megatexels/megapixels per second up to 1.47 gigatexels/gigapixels per second fill rates using 16-128 MB of video memory and one to four processors per board. In the professional market, Quantum3D will manufacturer systems that will utilize eight to thirty-two VSA-100 processors and 128 MB to two gigabytes of video memory to attain fill rates greater than three gigatexels/gigapixels per second in their Aalchemy product line