Voodoo 3 Announced

LAS VEGAS, Nevada, COMDEX November 16, 1998 3Dfx Interactive® Inc. (NASDAQ: TDFX) today announced its Voodoo3 product family, a range of integrated single chips that expand on the award-winning Voodoo2 and Voodoo Banshee architecture to deliver the worlds fastest 3D and 2D performance and support ultra high-definition displays. The first members of the product family, which are expected to be available commercially in the second quarter of 1999, include the pin-compatible Voodoo3 2000 for the PC OEM market and the Voodoo3 3000 for the retail add-in-board market.

"3D is the fastest growing segment in computing and Voodoo3s unprecedented 3D and 2D performance will enable our enthusiast gamers as well as the mainstream consumers to experience the next generation of highly complex 3D interactive entertainment," said Greg Ballard, president and chief executive officer for 3Dfx Interactive. "Voodoo3 answers the exploding demand for realistic graphics and no-compromise performance."

World's fastest 3D & 2D
With its dual, 32-bit rendering pipelines, Voodoo3 can generate more than seven million triangles per second, utilising its 100-billion operations per second 3D architecture. Voodoo3 delivers more than twice the triangle performance of two  Voodoo2 boards in the Scan Line Interleave (SLI) format currently the industrys fastest 3D graphics configuration. The Voodoo3 family utilises the 3Dfx-patented full-speed, single-cycle, single-pass multi-texturing, which enables critical features such as hardware accelerated bump-mapping and trilinear mip-mapping at 60 frames per second for todays most demanding entertainment titles. Voodoo3 integrates the worlds fastest 2D core from Voodoo Banshee, the Ziff-Davis Business Graphics Winbench® 99 leader, which includes a dedicated high speed 128-bit interface and an internal 256-bit datapath for optimised memory utilisation. Additionally, Voodoo3 features the industry's most complete hardware acceleration of the Microsoft Windows Graphics Driver Interface (GDI).

Optimised for PC-OEM & Retail
The Voodoo3 product family will launch with two new products, the Voodoo3 2000 and the Voodoo3 3000. Targeted at the mainstream PC-OEM motherboard and add-in-board markets, the Voodoo3 2000 is capable of achieving a maximum fill rate of 250-megatexels per second, while the enthusiast-targeted Voodoo3 3000 is capable of delivering greater than 366-megatexels per second fill rate performance. The pin-compatible AGP 2X Voodoo3 2000 and 3000 are optimised for Intels 440 LX/BX AGP chipset. In the first half of 1999, an AGP 4X version will be available for shipment with Intels new AGP 4X chipset to meet PC-OEM production requirements. The Voodoo3 2000 and 3000 support both SGRAM and SDRAM memory, as well as the Windows 95/98/2000, MAC OS, Unix, and Linux operating systems.

Ultra high resolution display
Voodoo3 supports ultra high-resolution display on PC monitors, LCD flat panels and high-definition television sets (HDTV). With the worlds fastest integrated RAMDAC at 350MHz, Voodoo3 achieves resolutions of up to 2048 x 1536 at a full 75Hz screen refresh rate, making it the only graphics chip able to support new proposed high-resolution display specifications from the VESA committee. Voodoo3 connects directly to 3Dfxs LCDfxÔ asic to support high-resolution LCD flat panel displays. LCDfx features unique sub-pixel image scaling technology that provides significant image quality improvement over conventional two-tap scaling filters.

MPEG2/DVD video acceleration
Additionally, Voodoo3 provides hardware DVD acceleration support to ensure 30 frames per second playback with no dropped frames. Coupled with the latest software MPEG2 codecs, Voodoo3 off-loads up to 40 percent of CPU overhead, enabling the CPU to do other tasks while playing DVD content.

Complete Voodoo compatibility
Voodoo3 provides complete compatibility with the largest installed base of enhanced 3D entertainment titles available; more than 500 entertainment titles are expected to be available by the end of the year. Voodoo3 is optimised for Microsofts Direct X6 application programming interface (API), as well as other standard APIs including Glide® from 3Dfx and OpenGL from Silicon Graphics.

Pricing and Availability
With 8.2 million transistors and manufactured in an advanced .25 micron CMOS process, Voodoo3 is designed for optimised performance on both Pentium II and future CPUs from Intel, as well as the AMD-K6®-2 processor featuring 3DNow!Ô technology.

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