Chris Hargrove on Voodoo 3

It's been a slow few news days, but today, we have this bit on the newly announced Voodoo 3 card from 3DFX. Billy over at Voodoo Extreme asked our own Chris Hargrove (programmer - Duke Nukem Forever) for his thoughts, and this is what Chris had to say...

The lack of 32 bit rendering isn't ultra-critical in terms of display output, at least to me (artists might disagree), but if that in turn eliminates possible support for stencil buffers, then yeah that would be a hit. As for the specs, it certainly doesn't look like a bad card; my primary concern is whether the drivers for D3D/OpenGL that they're using will actually _work_ as opposed to their current D3D/OpenGL drivers which are flaky and not the most robust in the world (compared to the TNT which has given us very few problems). If they do manage to get their drivers up to par though, then it sounds like it should be a competitive card, assuming the thing will actually run in a window for once. Now that also depends on when the Voodoo3 is slated to ship; if it's too far down the road (and/or if the card is still fullscreen only), then they're going to have problems.

The full article has comments from several other programmers in the industry, such as Tim Sweeney (Epic), Brian Goble (Monolith), Rick Johnson (Raven), John Carmack (id), as well as several others. If you'd like to read more about the Voodoo3 card, you can check out 3DFX's Voodoo 3 Press Release.

Posted by Joe Siegler on November 19, 1998 at 1:00 PM | Permalink
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