3dfx VSA-100 Visit

3dfx VSA-100 Mini-preview

Stephen "Blue" Heaslip
March 31, 2000

A couple of the 3D accelerated folks from 3dfx stopped off at the Blue Tower yesterday to show off the VSA-100 technology that will be at the root of their upcoming Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 accelerators. The 3/4-length card they brought along for show and tell (no keepsies) was a dual VSA-100 dealie running at 155 MHz (the final cards are expected to clock at about 166 MHz), which features an external power connector to forestall AGP power issues. The main new features they are showing off on these cards is their support of full-scene anti-aliasing and motion blur/depth of field effects.

It was a brief visit, so I'll share some brief impressions: The full scene 4X anti-aliasing is as cool as I expected, I had a taste of the effect in my first 3D accelerator, the Vérité (of all things) and was already aware of how even lower resolution images can be enhanced by smoothing out the stair-stepping around the edges. The effect is just as impressive on high-resolution scenes, eliminating not only jaggies around the edges of images, but removing all sorts of noise and moiré patterns from textures. It does entail a performance hit, and twitch gamers tend to turn off eye candy in favor of performance, but the full-scene AA is awfully sweet, with possibly even greater impact on how some images appear than the use of 32/24-bit color. Nothing screams "computer generated" like jagged edges, and switching between normal views of Falcon 4 and anti-aliased views was like switching between the past and the future. Here are a few jpg image comparisons showing the effect in Unreal Tournament:

For a better view of the original images, you can download a .zip with the .tga originals here (4.7 MB). It probably isn't necessary to point out the shots on the left are the ones without anti-aliasing, and the shots on the right have it turned on.

On the subject of color depth (in case you were wondering about the status of what was considered a shortcoming in previous Voodoo cards), 32-bit color is finally fully supported in the upcoming 3dfx parts as well, and similarly the new cards will finally also support larger textures (up to 2048x2048). If you are dubious about the other big announced feature, the motion blur, I have been as well, and the demonstration didn't really make me feel any less so. They had a version of Quake III Arena specially programmed to take advantage of the motion blur effect, and Q3A is clearly not the first choice as a game for this (even the extreme foot speed of the players back in Doom should not have generated blur as players run about), so it's not a good game to judge by, but on first glance it seemed pretty unimpressive (and an unacceptable performance hit, to boot). Additionally, to support this effect, it will need to be coded into each game, which will depend on how much developer support this generates. As we have seen with other such proprietary effects, like texture compression and environmental bump-mapping (even ones that have subsequently been adopted into DirectX), developers aren't always as eager to support these features, so I think even if motion blur becomes the Next Big Thing™, I'm pretty doubtful there will be a lot of games that take advantage of it during the lifespan of the first boards that support it.

In conclusion: Visual quality and speed were excellent, anti-aliasing is very cool, and the jury on motion blur is going to be out for a while.

3dfx expects to have the first VSA-100 accelerators on the market by the end of April.