3dfx Talks Voodoo5; Apple Frustratingly Hesitates to get InvolvedJuly 20, 2000 1:42 PM EDT
I just met with the 3dfx crew and am convinced now, more than ever, that 3dfx is determined to be a major player in the Macintosh market. It's so refreshing to see a company filled with such conviction when it comes to Macs, that it's almost unsettling.
3dfx just recently released the Voodoo5 4500 and 5500 PCI graphics card for the Mac. "The 5500 is the fastest board on the market," Bryan Speece told me. As a 3D solution for the serious Mac gamer, 3dfx has put a major dent in the luxury that ATI once felt (being the only major card manufacturer that seriously supported the Mac.
As many of you know, the history of 3dfx cards for the Mac has been a short, but rather dull one. The first Voodoo card appeared for the Mac almost a year after the PC introduction via Techworks who licensed the technology from 3dfx. While it was a major step forward for the Mac game market, it was months behind the technology available for the PC. The release of Voodoo 2 for the Mac was similarly late when the now defunct Micro Conversions provided its chip in 1998.
It wasn't until Bryan Speece decided to do something about this dicodemy between PCs and Macs that 3dfx began to get involved. Speece approached a variety of card manufacturers and proposed the idea of a full dedication to the Mac market. 3dfx, who had a good deal of interest, bit the hardest. Speece and his crew have been working for the past year to bring a top notch graphics card to the Mac, and the Voodoo5 is it.
The Voodoo5 isn't just a PC card with Mac drivers. In fact, Speece tells us that this card is engineered with the Mac in mind all of the way down to the silicon in the chips. These cards are Mac cards, not PC cards, and that can make all of the difference.
The Voodoo5 sports a new feature that antialiases any distortion that many cards leave on the screen. It's something you really don't notice until the antialiasing is turned on and off, but once you are aware of it, you're never going to want to go back and older card. The card also features a new technology called "T-Buffer" effects. This is a proprietary feature that the developer must implement, but it can give a game a very cinematic look and feel. It provides digital blurring (as in A Bugs Life) and a very realistic motion blur, among other features.
The way the card is being made available on the Mac is somewhat troublesome, but at the current time, is the only way the card can be made available at all: PCI. PCI, as many of you know, is the classic expansion solution for most of the Macs out there today. New Macs, however, ship with an AGP slot as well, which handles all of the graphics. The benefit of AGP is that it can support a much faster card.
3dfx can't produce an AGP vesion of the Voodoo5 (which would be 10-15% faster than the PCI version), however, because retailers such as CompUSA would refuse to carry it due to the small amount of AGP slots in the Mac market as compared with PCI. 3dfx wants to make an AGP version, though, and the only way to get it in Macs is to have Apple include it as a build-to-order option on the Apple Store. This is something 3dfx would love (as well as gamers), but Apple has yet to even bite, unfortunately. When the Voodoo5 6000 comes out for PC, a Mac version won't be possible, simply because the PCI slot is not fast enough to support the card.
I also asked 3dfx about the new proprietary monitor connector that was debuted at the Keynote on Wednesday. At the current time, there is no way to hook one of these new monitors up to a Voodoo card. The official statement from 3dfx is that they will support the new connection in some capacity in the future, but no details have been given as yet.
I had a great meeting with the 3dfx folks, and if you're in the market for a new 3D card for your aging Mac, you'll want to seriously take a look at what the Voodoo5 technology has to offer.
