1. What is Voodoo 2?
Voodoo 2 is the next generation of Voodoo Graphics. It is a full-screen 3D-only solution that will use an external pass-through cable to connect to your computer's existing video card. We believe Voodoo2 will be faster and more powerfull than any other 3d product available for the home PC.

2. What are the advantages of V2 over Voodoo Graphics?
Mainly in speed and multiple textures per pixel. It is estimated that V2's performance will be around 3 times that of Voodoo Graphics. It will also be able to higher resolutions then Voodoo Graphics, up to 1024 X 768. These improvements will allow game designers to create more complex 3D environments and characters, resulting in more stunning visuals. Multiple textures per pixel allows for enhanced special effects, single pass trilinear filtering, and improved performance.

3. What are the computer requirements for V2?
The same as for Voodoo Graphics, which is a Pentium 90 or higher with 16 megs of RAM or more and a 2.1 compliant PCI bus. REMEMBER that the software for the V2 may have DIFFERENT requirements to run properly....

4. What games will run on V2?
All games using Microsoft's Direct3D API, plus most all games running the current version of 3Dfx's Glide API (a couple older Glide games will need to be recompiled to the newer version of Glide, specifically; games compiled or statically linked to the Glide1.dll). Games that use the Quake engine will run great using its OpenGl mini-driver. Quake has been tested at up to 116fps on a Pentium2-266 and V2! For the most part every game that runs on Voodoo Rush and all the main games on Voodoo Graphics will be even better on V2! There are over 400 games available or in development.

5. My system has an AGP (Advanced Graphics Port) slot. Will the V2 fit in there?
Yes, Voodoo2 technology can utilize the AGP slot in what is called "PCI 66 mode". This simply means the V2 will work in the AGP slot at the 66mhz bus rate instead of 33mhz bus rate of the PCI slot. Beyond that, it would be identical to the PCI version It is up to the companies that make the V2 card to create the AGP version.

6. What is SLI?
SLI stands for Scan Line Interleaving. This means if you have 2 PCI cards from the same company, you can connect them together using a supplied internal cable. One of the cards would display the odd number fields, and the other card would display the even number fields. This will almost double the fill rate performance of Voodoo2.

7. Can I connect an AGP and a PCI card for SLI? What about a Voodoo Graphics card with a Voodoo2 card?
No and no. The only way to get SLI is to have 2 identical cards from the same manufacturer. SLI is limited to 2 PCI cards.

8. Which would have better performance, 1 AGP card or 2 PCI cards (with SLI)?
This depends upon the application's bottlenecks. If the application is bus limited, AGP may be faster than SLI. If the application is fill rate limited and not CPU bound, SLI may be faster. In general SLI will have better performance than AGP in fill rate.

9. What are the memory configurations V2 cards will be available in?
This is up to the manufacturers and has not been announced yet. Voodoo2 supports from 2 to 4 MB of EDO frame buffer memory per card, and from 2 to 4 MB of EDO memory for each texture processor per card. This makes the possible configurations: 2/2/2, 4/2/2, 2/4/4, and 4/4/4.

10. Can I use a Voodoo Rush card with V2?
Yes. Any 2D card will work with V2. In the case of Voodoo Rush and Voodoo2 in the same machine you would choose Voodoo2 when the game begins.

11. When will Voodoo2 be available and how much will it cost?
Diamond Multimedia is the first company to announce they will be producing a Voodoo2 card. It is expected to ship at the end of the first Quarter of 1998. They have not announced a suggested price yet; the current guess is somewhere around $300. Creative Labs, Jazz Multimedia, Orchid, Canopus and others will all announce plans for Voodoo2 based products @ Comdex.

12. Will the Voodoo 2 be limited to Fullscreen only like the current Voodoo Graphics cards?
Yes, Voodoo2 is a full-screen, 3d-only accelerator. It can make use of a pass-through cable to connect your 2D card to the Voodoo2's 3D, all to the same display. You can make use of a two input monitor and use the monitor's controls to select the Voodoo2's output, or that of the 2d controller.

13. What are the requirements for Scan Line Interleaving (SLI)? Can it go beyond 2 cards?
Voodoo2 requires two open PCI cards; two identical Voodoo2 based cards from the same manufacturer, and Voodoo2 drivers. Scan Line Interleaving is limited to two cards.

14. Would 2 PCI cards with SLI beat the performance of 1 AGP card?
Depends on the application. If the application is bus bandwidth limited and not fill rate limited, an AGP solution could be faster. If the application is fill rate limited, and not processor bound, SLI could outperform AGP.

15. How much faster is the AGP version as opposed to the PCI version? Is the AGP card 1X or 2X? Is AGP to be released at the same time as PCI?
Voodoo2 is AGP 1x compatible. The card works in an AGP 1x mode without sidebands, pipelining, texturing from AGP, etc. It treats AGP as a 66 MHz PCI bus. The actual release dates for implementations are up to our OEMs. It is likely that PCI will ship first, as there are many more open PCI slots than AGP slots.

16. Will there be an upgraded Voodoo2 version of Voodoo Rush, and can this use SLI?
No. Voodoo Rush uses different technology, and is not capable of SLI.

17. Will 3Dfx be dropping their price of the first Voodoo Graphics chipsets to OEMs?
3Dfx cannot announce any pricing activity, sorry.

18. Any Voodoo2-ready software you are allowed to mention at this time?
Other than glQuake, Quake2 and games based on the Quake engine, no. Sorry. Look for more @ Comdex. At Comdex we will be demonstrating: glQuake, Quake2, Half Life, Earth Siege 3, Riot, SiN, Hexen 2, Die by the Sword, Messiah, Sacrafice, Jetfighter 3, Inreal, Tanarus, Blood 2, Ultimate Race Pro, Incoming, MS Baseball, MS Flight Simulator, Longbow 2, Wing Commander Prophecy, NHL Hockey '98, Myth, Need for Speed 2 SE, Heavy Gear, Andretti Racing, Turok, Cart Racing, Newfire's Torch and Catalyst, Motion Factory's Motivate.

19. An article states that one can get upwards of 110 fps on Quake 2. What hardware was used, the resolution, the operating system, as well as the software settings used (if any), and was this with/out VSYNC?
Pentium 2 @ 266. 440FX chipset. 64MB EDO DRAM. WindowsNT4. Voodoo2 bringup board (4/4/4 config) @ 90 Mhz. No VSYNC. glQuake with multitexture extensions. 640 x 480 window size. Viewsize 120. No sound. No VSYNC simply means that swapbuffer commands are not held pending for VSYNC to avoid idling the graphics engine waiting on monitor refresh.

20. Will 100Mhz motherboards be supported?
100Mhz what? 100 Mhz Front-side bus? Yes. 100 MHz SDRAM? Yes.

21. Although the polygon calculation capability has gone by 3 times, the fill rate has only gone up by twice the original amount. Does this mean that overall performance can only go up by the same amount?
No. It depends on the bottleneck. Full triangle setup in hardware offers many things. Higher triangle rates, lower CPU utilization, etc... If the content is fill rate limited, and not triangle or CPU limited, Voodoo2 could offer 2x or more the performance. The reason I say more is that if the game is using multipass rendering (as glQuake does), the second pass can be eliminated by making use of the two textures per pixel functionality of Voodoo2, which could offer up to 4x the performance...

22. Although the original chipset was supposed to be capable of 1 million polygons per second and 45 million pixel fill rate, most reviews with performance stats indicated that real world performance was half these figures. Will the same be true again?
Voodoo1's triangle rate is 1Mtris/sec, most games ran at less than half of that speed since games need a significant percentage of the CPU for game logic and the like. We have measured, in the real world, 3M triangles/sec and 90 Mpixels. We expect real games to reach and even exceed 1Mtris/sec, in fact they may approach 1.5Mtris/sec on fast CPUs. This should be easy to accomplish since Voodoo2 supports full triangle setup in hardware. We actually have measured 2.7Mtris/sec on a simple loop on a P5-166.

23. How does the Voodoo 2 compare to the Sega model 3 arcade board, which itself is rated at a real world performance of 1 million polygons per second?
Higher triangle rate. The Sega model three supports hardware lighting and hardware full scene antialiasing, along with more texture memory and a significant difference in price.

24. Isn't the Voodoo2 supposed to more processor dependent than the original? If so, then what would be the performance difference (for the Voodoo2) between a Pentium based system and a Pentium 2 based system?
Voodoo2 should be LESS processor dependent that the original, since Voodoo2 incorporates full triangle setup, relieving the processor of those duties. It is true that it is unlikely than a lower performance processor will be capable of providing the data rates required to reach peak performance of Voodoo2, but in terms of aggregate performance, Voodoo2 is less processor dependent than Voodoo1.

25. How much memory, and what types of memory will it have (ie. if it has 6 mb of RAM, is that 2 of Frame buffer and 4 of texture, etc.)? Can the memory be user-expandable?
Voodoo2 can be configured with 2 to 4 MB of EDO frame buffer memory, and 2 to 4 MB of EDO texture memory per texture processor. Each texture processor needs to have the same amount of memory. So configurations could be: 2/2/2, 2/4/4, 4/2/2, or 4/4/4. Designing user-expandable cards is difficult with designs running at this frequency, but not impossible. It is up to individual OEM's to build specific implementations of products based on Voodoo2 technology.

26. Will Voodoo2 cards support TV-out, like the Canopus Pure3D? Is Canopus planning a Voodoo2 release?
They could, that functionality is supported. It is up to individual OEM's to provide those implementations. I can't comment about Canopus, sorry.

27. Will V2 have any new features to make the graphics look better?
? Multiple textures (2) per pixel in a single pass. This allows for all sorts of interesting special effects such as; lighting maps (ala glQuake), detail textures, shadow maps, simulated bump mapping, reflection maps, environment maps, etc... With the increases in fill rates we feel that edge antialiasing becomes more feasable as well. In addition, if utilizing the multiple textures per pixel functionality makes a game that previously required multipass into a single pass game (as it does with glQuake), image quality will be improved as it will prevent the write and read to the 16-bit frame buffer. We have also improved the quality of our filtering.

28. Any support for the following: 24 bit rendering; more than 3 frame buffers; bump mapping; edge anti-aliasing; anisotropic filtering; multipass environmental effects (e.g. shadows and reflections)?
24 bit rendering? Yes. All rendering is calculated internally at 32-bit RGBA or higher precision, but all writes to the frame buffer at 16-bits, and the frame buffer only displays 16-bits worth of data. More than 3 frame buffers? No. Bump mapping? Yes, through texture mapping. Not "true" phong bump mapping, but virtually indistinguishable. Edge anti-aliasing? Yes. Anisotropic filtering? No, but single pass trilinear filtering is supported. Multipass environmental effects (e.g. shadows and reflections)? Yes, actually many of those multipass effects can now be done in a single pass with the 2 texture per pixel functionality.

29. Will non-Intel owners have the same decrease in performance with Voodoo2 as they do with current Voodoo Graphics?
That depends on the floating-point performance of those processors, but in general Voodoo2 should be less processor dependent than Voodoo1 due to its full triangle setup in hardware.

30. Since the rough estimate of polygons needed to fully create a 3d world to fully life like realism is 80 million polygons a second, how soon before 3dfx matches this?
Ummmm, sooner than anyone else we hope!

31. Does Voodoo2 support 960 x 720 resolutions?
Unfortunately not, that resolution is only supported with 2 boards running in SLI with 4MB frame buffers on each. Voodoo2 requires that the amount of memory for a particular resolution must be such that the vertical and horizontal resolutions must be evenly divisible by 32. (The video refresh controller, though can output any particular resolution, but the "virtual" size required for the memory footprint must be in dimensions evenly divisible by 32). So, 960x720 actually requires 960x736 amount of memory. 960x736x2x3 = 4.04MBytes

32. Can an SLI pair of Voodoo2 cards span empty PCI slots?
Yes, Voodoo2 will function in SLI mode in non-contiguous PCI slots as long as the SLI cable is long enough to reach between the two cards. The current cable length is 3.1".

33. When do we hear about Banshee?
In the immortal words of John Carmack: "When it's done." :)

34. How can I buy a graphics cards which uses the Voodoo Graphics chipset?
Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo Rush-based cards are currently available from several different board manufacturers. Check Voodoo for Sale for specific information.

35. Do I still need a 2D accelerator card with my Voodoo Graphics-based card?
Yes, Voodoo Graphics is a 3D-only accelerator. Voodoo Rush on the other hand is a 3D accelerator that is incorporated on a 2D video card - an additional 2D board is therefore not required for Voodoo Rush

36. Which 2D accelerators are compatible with my Voodoo Graphics-based card?
Most popular 2D accelerator cards will work with your Voodoo Graphics-based card.

37. What games/applications support Voodoo Graphics?
See our Software Titles page for titles that are currently available and under development.

38. Are there any incompatibilities with Cyrix 686 systems?
No. Our original demos were compiled with Pentium-specific instructions which would not run on Cyrix 686 chips. This has been since corrected. Updated demos are available from the 3Dfx website under software updates.

39. I have an S3 968/868 based video card in my system. Why am I having problems?
Some S3 968/ 868 based boards report that they are using 32 MB of frame buffer memory when they are actually using 64. When your Voodoo Graphics-based card attempts to find a free range of memory to claim for memory-mapped IO, this range overlaps the range actually in use by the S3 card.

40. How can I fix it?
Click here for S3FIX - a self-extracting zip file. Follow the README instructions.

41. Does Voodoo Graphics support OpenGL?
We have released a DLL that is a subset of OpenGL that is specifically designed to run GLQuake under Win32. A more complete OpenGL implementation under development is slated for release later this year.

42. Does Voodoo Graphics support Windows NT 4.0?
Yes, our proprietary API, Glide, supports NT 4.0. Direct3D and OpenGL drivers for Windows NT 4.0 are in development.

43. What about the MAC?
The TechWorks Power3D card, for any PCI-based PowerMac, is based on Voodoo Graphics. For specific requirements and compatibility information, please see the TechWorks website at www.techworks.com

44. What about Linux? BeOS? DEC Alpha? Solaris?
It's amazing how many folks have a favorite platform. Many of us here do also. We're thinking about all of these seriously-- in some cases we may even have prototype drivers up in the lab. But nothing to announce... yet.

45. Are the Voodoo Graphics chips on the Monster3D and Righteous3D boards the SAME chips that are in the arcade machines?
Absolutely. That is, after all, the point.

46. What are the differences between the Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo Rush chipsets?
The basic difference is that Voodoo Rush works with a compatible windows accelerator to perform 3D in a window, while Voodoo Graphics performs full screen 3D only. 3D performance of Voodoo Rush is similar to Voodoo Graphics.

47. What is an Obsidian board? How is it different from the Monster 3D and Righteous 3D cards?
Obsidian is actually the name of a FAMILY of 3D graphics boards developed for professional applications. The Obsidian boards are used by OEMs, system integrators, and VARs who deploy Obsidian-based bundles or systems in coin-op/arcade, LBE, visual simulation and 3D design markets. The main differences are in the NUMBER of Voodoo Graphics chips that the board features, the AMOUNT OF MEMORY associated with each chip, and the PRICE. Please contact Quantum3D for more information.