Not long after arriving at ECTS, and visiting the 3dfx booth, I learnt that Scott Sellers would be attending the show, and was indeed flying in this very day. As soon as I heard this my mind started working overtime - it was too good an opportunity to pass up; I had to go an introduce myself and see if I could score a scoop interview with one of the original creators of Voodoo Graphics for you guys here! Despite obviously being very busy during the show, I eventually (after much bugging and pestering on my part!) managed to sit down with Scott just after the show closed for the day. Heres what he had to say…
10 months, she's 10 months old now. And she's great! Keeps her parents up all the time!
Which keeps you more occupied though - 3dfx or her!?
Good question - I think it pretty much split evenly!
And how about the other arrival, i.e. the VSA-100?
Well, VSA-100 is a fully-grown child now. It's to bed, we've moved on to the next step.
Can you elaborate on that step or not?
Oh, well, everyone knows we are working on a product called Rampage. We've been working on it for some time, and we feel confident that its going to be a very, very good product for us.
What can I say… Its certainly going to advance the Full Scene Anti-Aliasing abilities we've pioneered with VSA-100. I think its unquestioned that FSAA is a technology that's here to stay, and that once people see it they don't want to go back to Aliased rendering. The only negative right now is the performance impact that's associated with FSAA, and you will certainly see some improvements in that area with Rampage as well as future products. Eventually to give Anti-Aliasing for free is certainly a goal that we have.
OK, Lets talk about the Voodoo 5 6000! I see you've brought one with you; how final is that?
The board looks to be final.
We've gone through subsequent iterations of it along the way, and really it's a little bit later than we would have liked, but it's a complicated board - 50Watts of power, 4 chips, 128Meg of RAM. The power supply circuitry itself is very complicated - we use an external power supply which had to be sourced, and spec'ed out. So, everything was non-trivial about the project.
We are extremely happy with the performance, and as we've said all along, its going to be the most powerful, best performing high resolution accelerator out there and we continue to be confident about that.
Are we talking faster than GTS Ultra's?
Errrr, we'll leave that one to the reviews! But we certainly feel very good about the product.
