Shadow Warrior 3DFX Patch News

The following is an official statement from 3Dfx regarding the lack of Voodoo Rush support in the 3Dfx patch for Shadow Warrior.

From Brian:
"The conversion of the Build engine (used in Shadow Warrior, Blood, etc.) was originally started and prototyped on Voodoo Graphics. Due to the engine's span-based architecture as opposed to Voodoo's triangle based rasterizing, there were many obstacles to overcome. Over the course of months we were able to get Voodoo's performance better by taking some shortcuts and focusing entirely on that piece of hardware.

Once completed, we realized that the shortcuts we took would not lend themselves well to performance on Voodoo Rush (frame buffer memory is laid out differently for example.) Although considerable time was spent exploring Voodoo Rush support, nothing short of redesigning the entire engine would fix this. We came to the unfortunate conclusion that Voodoo Rush support could not be included in this product.

3Dfx Interactive remains committed to supporting its game developers and consumers for both Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo Rush. Although the differences between Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo Rush hardware are minimal and don't affect many games, a couple have turned up. Unfortunately, the Build engine is one of them. As always 3Dfx will continue to work on getting the best and most number of titles optimized for Voodoo owners."

Brian P. Bruning
3Dfx Interactive Developer Relations Manager

Posted by Joe Siegler on November 29, 1997 at 12:01 PM | Permalink
News Categories: Shadow Warrior