3Dfx Interactive - Press News - Coming Soon Magazine

3DFX INTERACTIVE ANNOUNCES THE REVOLUTIONARY VOODOO2 GRAPHICS CHIPSET

New 3D Accelerator Boasts 3X Boost in Performance, Expected to Hit Retail Q1 '98

San Jose, CA, November 3, 1997 -- 3Dfx Interactive, Inc. (NASDAQ: TDFX) today announced plans for the introduction of their new standard in 3D acceleration, Voodoo 2 Graphics.

A generational leap beyond the Company's original award winning Voodoo Graphics chipset, Voodoo 2 will be available at the consumer level in the first Quarter of 1998 and will retail for under $300.

Voodoo 2 is an expandable architecture with a base configuration of a 192-bit memory architecture and 2.2 Gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth, delivering over 50 BOPS (Billions of Operations per Second). This configuration delivers an incredible 3 million triangles per second and 90 million dual-textured, bilinear-filtered, per-pixel MIP-mapped, alpha-blended, Z-buffered pixels per second, over three times the performance of the current Voodoo Graphics. Voodoo 2 contains a full floating-point hardware triangle setup unit for maximum triangle throughput on Pentium, Pentium Pro and Pentium II powered systems. Voodoo 2 is also an AGP-capable technology designed to utilize the higher bandwidth available through AGP and will support 3D games with resolutions up to 1024 X 768. "We believe that Voodoo 2 will not only change the way people play games, but the way that people design games," said Greg Ballard, President and CEO, 3Dfx Interactive. "The original Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo Rush chipsets opened people's eyes to the possibilities of 3D gaming and the response has been overwhelming. We have once again set the standard by which all other 3D accelerators will be judged."

Since Voodoo 2 maintains full software compatibility with Microsoft's Direct3D, 3Dfx's Glide and OpenGL, current 3Dfx accelerated games will run on the new chipset. This new level of technology will not require the end user to purchase new software, as the current catalog of over 150 3Dfx enhanced titles will not only run on Voodoo 2, but will receive a noticeable improvement in performance.

Two technologies developed specifically for 3Dfx's arcade customers have now been made available to PC game players. The basic chipset for Voodoo 2 contains two texture processing units that simultaneously apply two textures to a triangle for single-pass, single-cycle rendering of effects such as trilinear filtering, sophisticated lighting, spotlights and detail texturing. Dual texture units effectively double the texture fill rate and provide dramatic performance increases in games such as id Software's Quake and Quake 2, which will run upwards of 110 frames per second.

Customers will also be able to purchase a second board of the same type and connect the two for even faster gameplay. Voodoo 2 will automatically detect a second chipset and will begin operating in Scanline Interleave (SLI) mode, where the first chipset draws the even scanlines of a frame while the second chipset draws the odd, reducing the amount of work per chipset by half and allowing each card to run at twice the speed. This high-end configuration expands to a 384-bit memory architecture with 4.3 Gigabytes per second memory bandwidth, achieving an amazing 180 million pixels per second.

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3Dfx Interactive, a publicly traded company (Nasdaq: TDFX), develops high performance, cost-effective 3D media processors, software and related technology that are designed to enable a highly immersive, interactive and realistic 3D experience across interactive electronic entertainment platforms - personal computers, coin-operated arcade systems and location-based entertainment ("LBE"). Current 3Dfx Interactive products include the Voodoo family of accelerator chipsets, Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo Rush.

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