As
I was on my way to my last scheduled interview at Macworld, I was mentally
composing the lead paragraph of my show wrap-up story, and it was going
to go something like this:
"While many companies offered interesting products, all of them combined
were overshadowed by Apple's announcements of standard multiprocessing
CPUs, the G4 Cube and a new mouse."
That's what I was thinking, anyway, until I saw the pictures coming
from the two new display cards from 3dfx Interactive, the Voodoo 5 4500
and 5500.
I've been doing Mac graphics professionally for more than a decade,
most of that in video, and I have to tell you, I've never seen anything
like this before. The richness of the colors I was seeing could have
come from the images they selected, and the fact that one of the displays
they used for demonstration purposes was the jaw-dropping Apple Cinema
display, so I focused elsewhere.
What struck me most on first glance was the depth of the detail I saw
and the rock-solid scanning. My observation brought a smile from Brian
Speece, who's directing Macintosh business development for 3dfx.
"We're displaying 2,048 x 1,536 at 85 Hz," he said. "Nobody
else on the Mac can handle a resolution like that at this refresh rate."
That was for 2D, however, using the Voodoo 5 4500 card. While 2D is
admittedly almost exclusively what I do, I knew of 3dfx's reputation
for, well, 3D. Since the day their products have been introduced, 3dfx's
cards have completely dominated the PC gaming market, with the Voodoo
3 card having been the sales leader for the last 12 months. More than
just sales, the Voodoo series has dominated with the caliber of their
technology.
It's one thing to say that the Voodoo5 was named Macworld's best display
by MacWEEK, which it was, but it's saying much more for games that the
PC version of this product won recently won best of show from the hard
core gamers at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3).
The Mac has needed serious 3D display power to be a serious gaming platform.
We have it now, thank you very much.
It's really impossible for me to demonstrate just how much better the
Voodoo 5 5500 looks than anything you've ever seen on a Macintosh for
the simple reason that any pictures I tried to show you would have to
be seen on the Mac display card you're using. Oops.
Instead, let me run a few numbers by you. The 4500 card can display
333 megapixels per second, more than any other Mac card, according to
Speece. The 5500, though, doubles it: 667,000 pixels per second. This
allows display of a stunning 60 frames per second, speeds that Mac users
just haven't seen without serious compromises in image quality. In fact,
though, 3dfx doesn't believe in those kinds of compromises.
"We support all three Macintosh 3D display technologies [OpenGL,
QuickDraw 3D Rave and GLIDE]," says Speece. "No one else supports
all three. No one else can handle our kinds of display speeds in any
of those three. So coming out of the gate, we offer better speeds and
higher resolutions than any Mac display card using any display technology,
and we do it in a single product."
Coming out of the gate this strong was no accident, of course, and took
considerable planning on the part of 3dfx. While the first clue many
of us had about their plans was their announcement earlier this year
that they'd be introducing Mac cards, Mac compatibility has been engineered
into the silicon of their VSA-100 chip for more than a year. The development
team for the Mac product line includes engineers from nearly every major
company that's ever worked on Mac graphics hardware.
"The product introductions here at Macworld are a long way from the
end of what we want to see happen," says Speece. "We want to
see this drive developers to push harder at the limits of Mac gaming
technology, which will drive our development team to introduce new technologies
for developers to use, and so on. We really see this as the beginning
of a different world for Mac gamers and developers."
One of the most exciting technologies I saw is what 3dfx calls Full
Scene Antialiasing (FSA), which does exactly what it suggests: it removes
the flickering fine lines and random pixels common in high-resolution
computer graphics.
Computer artists have known for a long time that the secret to increasing
realism for computer graphics is sometimes to increase blur. It seems
counterintuitive, but blur is one reason why film images look more "real"
to many eyes than video does, even though video can resolve finer details,
details that can unfortunately cause visual interference. FSA smoothes
out some of those overly sharp details in ways that add not only to
the realism of moving scenes, but their enjoyability.
"In aiming for top performance, we used to stress frame rate. That
made sense a few years ago when 20 frames per second was a big deal,"
Speece points out. "But as we all approach 60 frames per second,
our competitors are by and large continuing to just increase frame rate.
That really doesn't do anything for frame rate, except to increase the
rate of the flicker. It actually makes things look worse because the
flickering draws more attention to itself.
"When we first started talking about FSA, everybody ignored us. That
became impossible as soon as they saw how amazing it looks," laughs
Speece. "But what they did was try to write hacks into the drivers,
which runs the risk of incompatibilities. Sure enough, some computers
are crashing when they try to run this kind of add-on code, and others
are running so much slower that it's not worth using. Ours is the only
full-scene antialiasing built into the chips, and," he adds with
a smile, "we hold the patent on it."
As a result of all this processing power built into the chip, those
667,000 megapixels running 60 frames per second are sampled four times,
and the antialiasing is calculated from the average of each of the samples.
Rather than globally tossing out resolution with a heavy-handed blur,
the 5500's silicon allows a highly sophisticated algorithm to take advantage
of the unprecedented amount of data passing though its system to create
an elegant image of unparalleled realism.
Which is just what gamers want when they blow something into smithereens.
The 4500, by the way, only offers two-time sampling, rather than four,
but still looks stunning to me.
Using the sales volume of their PC products to provide economies of
scale—their Mac offerings use the same VSA-100 chip as the PC line—the
introductory prices for these cards are remarkably low: $199 for the
4500 and only $329 for the 5500.
The eagle-eyed will have noticed that the illustration of the Voodoo
5500 card above is a PCI card. The question immediately becomes, "Are
these things worth using up one of the Macs precious PCI slots?"
The answer is yes—if you have a slot to spare. This is a non-issue for
most gamers, of course, and likely for many graphics professionals,
almost of all of whom have at least one slot open. For some video professionals,
though, a spare PCI slot is out of the question. While this will cost
3dfx relatively few sales, I think it's a shame that it should cost
them any. I hope they reconsider their decision not to bring out a Mac
AGP card like they have for the peecee users. That high-end video and
graphics professionals be among the handful of those shut out from using
these miraculous cards is nothing short of tragic. (Did I say pretty
please?)
But for anyone else, both of these cards are miraculous indeed. The
Voodoo 5 4500 and 5500 cards are the only products I saw at Macworld
that took my breath away as much as Apple's own product announcements.
Anyone who has room for one of these should buy one. I really think
it's just that simple. And most definitely not just gamers, either.
Either is an absolute must for graphic artists, compositors, writers,
scientists, indeed anyone who spends much time looking at their computer
monitor. The Voodoo 5 4500 and 5500 represent the new standard for Mac
display technology.
