April 12
Voodoo4 and 5 Coming to Mac
Voodoo cards support OpenGL, Glide and Rave

by David Nagel
Senior Producer

Everything's finally going the way it should for the Macintosh platform. At the NAB show, we've seen some amazing hardware and software that blows away anything previously available. And now 3dfx is adding to the exponentially expanding hardware options for the Mac with the announcement of Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 PCI-based graphics accelerator cards. As earlier rumored, the new cards add support for QuickDraw 3D Rave, in addition to Glide and OpenGL. Mac users have little left to dream about.

The new Voodoo cards, which are expected to ship by the end of the company's second fiscal quarter (ending July 31), offer 32 MB and 64 MB of RAM and range in price from $200 to $329. Both will include standard monitor outputs and digital connectors. Both offer hardware anti-aliasing, T-Buffer digital cinematic effects and FXT1 texture compression. Both cards can be upgraded for Mac OS X. But that's not all.

Voodoo4 4500
The Voodoo4 4500 PCI for Mac features a single VSA-100 processor and 32 MB of graphics memory. The VSA-100 (Voodoo Scalable Architecture) incorporates 3D features like 32-bit RGBA rendering, 24-bit depth-buffer (Z and W), 8-bit stencil rendering, FXT1 texture compression support, 32-bit textures, 2,048 x 2,048 texture size support, advanced texture and color combine capabilities and the native support of Macintosh data formats. It also includes an enhanced 2D engine and a 350 MHz RAMDAC. The Voodoo4 4500 renders two fully featured pixels per clock and will deliver up to 333 megatexels/megapixels per second fill rates. It's expected to come in below $200.

Voodoo5 5500
The Voodoo5 5500 PCI for Mac features dual VSA-100 processors and 64 MB of total graphics memory. It's targeted toward 3D Professionals and serious gamers, providing support for 3D modeling, CAD, animation and virtual reality applications. The multi-chip capabilities of the VSA-100 allow 3D rendering that employs full-scene hardware anti-aliasing at real-time frame rates. Additionally, the Voodoo5 5500 PCI enables T-Buffer digital cinematic effects, including motion blur, programmable depth of field, soft shadows and soft reflections. The Voodoo5 5500 PCI, which renders four fully featured pixels per clock, will deliver up to 667 megatexels/megapixels per second fill rates and is expected to be priced at $329.99.

For more information, visit http://www.3dfx.com.

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