In the world of 3D accelerators, the name 3Dfx is sacred. Before the release of the Voodoo2, hard-core gamers were already talking about 3Dfx's leap into the 2D graphics world, the Voodoo Banshee. The talking is now over as 3Dfx has unveiled the Banshee. Will the new chip turn the rest of the world on to 3Dfx's technical prowess? It just might.

　　On Friday afternoon, 3Dfx's public relations director, Steve Schick, and director of product marketing, Saul Altabet, came to GameSpot's offices to show off the reference board for Banshee, and what we saw was pretty impressive.

　　Rather than marry an amazing 3D chip to a new 2D chip, 3Dfx has built 2D capabilities around the power of the Voodoo2 and merged them onto a single chip. Looking at the board itself, the first thing we noticed was its elegant minimalist approach to design. The unit has only one chip surrounded by a few memory modules and other various components.

　　But the Banshee isn't going to be the flagship for the company - the Voodoo2 will remain the high-end board for now. But the new Banshee will pit 3Dfx against other graphics card makers that have dominated the 2D market for years. The fact that the Banshee will run over 250 games 3D enhanced for Voodoo Graphics and the Voodoo2, gamers who don't currently have one of the company's previous products are sure to be tempted by this offering.

　　The Voodoo Banshee boasts the highest levels of 2D performance ever for applications outside and inside the game realm including presentation graphics, web browsing, and faster refreshes in Windows along with faster 2D gameplay for any games using DirectDraw.

　　So what will the Banshee do for 2D?

　　On the technology side, the Banshee uses a dedicated 128-bit external memory interface with a 256-bit datapath for optimized memory utilization. Windows users will see a graphical boost because 3Dfx has burned the Microsoft Windows Graphics Driver Interface (GDI) functions onto the Banshee chip. The GDI controls and manages what you see on your screen whenever you run Windows. Other graphics card makers have worked around the problem by emulating the GDI functionality in software. 3Dfx's Altabet said that the reason for placing the functions on the chip itself was because the Windows GDI is pretty stable now, and much of the functionality hasn't really changed. 3Dfx figured that with the GDI's stability, it was time to take the functions out of software emulation and get them hard-coded into the Banshee's chip. Not only does this increase speed by taking out one level of the process (as 3Dfx has shown, hardware elements outperform software), it also will enable Windows to draw polygons in tens of clock cycles instead of the usually thousands of cycles done by other 2D cards. It does this by filling a polygon from a single pixel and having it replicate itself. In short, it will make your computing faster.

　　If you still play DOS games, the Voodoo Banshee's 128-bit video graphics adapter (VGA) will help you get even more graphics performance.

　　One of the Banshee's other features is its ability to blockwrite RAM for better SGRAM performance from 4MB and all the way up to 16MB of SGRAM (with support for 16MB of SDRAM.) Blockwrite can quadruple 2D and 3D performance for polygon fills and Z-buffer clears. This technology, along with its unified structure, has one limitation: It won't allow you to use the Scanline Interleaving (SLI) feature that has made the Voodoo2 so popular. You can still run a Voodoo2 alongside a Voodoo Banshee board for high-end 3D gaming, though 3Dfx is calling the Banshee its mass-market chip, and its Voodoo2 will remain its game enthusiast chip. One feature that 3Dfx premiered with the Voodoo2 and has moved over to the Banshee is the ability to accept out-of-order executions from a Pentium II. This can speed up performance by up to 25 percent on some computers. Usually what happens is that a processor can take longer to execute an order, and in a linear order model, the orders have to be done in order. By adding out-of-order execution, the processor can complete the function that takes a little longer and at the same time begin executing the next logical function.

　　Enhancements gamers should be impressed by include DVD support, add-on support, and a video in/out port. Out of the box, users get DVD decoding with help from the CPU, and for those looking for better DVD output, 3Dfx will be offering a DVD decoder daughtercard. Through the use of a 230/250 DAC, the board can output to a maximum resolution of HDTV dimensions of 1920x1440. On the reference board that we saw, there was a standard video part alongside an S-video port. Although many gamers may not have played with video-out yet, the feature is great for playing any game that supports more than one player on the same screen. Or you could just show off your latest web pages at your next party. As DVD increases in popularity, running DVD from your PC should give you the ability to upgrade more easily than having a costly set-top box solution for your TV.

　　One of the new graphics functions that 3Dfx added to the Banshee is called environmental mapping. The demo that was run for us showed a mirror suspended in the middle of a room. As the room spun around, it reflected the Anubus (the company's mascot) and the walls behind him. The other demo showing of the feature made Anubus disappear and take on the properties of the creature in the movie Predator.

　　If you're into performance based on numbers, the Banshee scored a 500 on Computer Gaming World's GameGauge, only beaten by a Voodoo2 in an SLI configuration. The closest competitor, the Riva 128ZX, scored a 281. More traditional benchmarks reveal that the board scores a 827 with 3D WinBench 98 under DirectX 5.0 (640x480x16bbp on a Pentium II 400) and screamed up to an 1150 under DirectX 6.0 (640x480x16bbp on a Pentium II 400).

　　The versatile chip is both PCI/AGP 1X & 2X-compliant under Windows 9X and Windows NT. APIs supported by the Banshee include Glide, OpenGL, Direct3D and DirectX 6.0. Production versions of the Banshee should be hitting shelves sometime in the third quarter of 1998, ahead of the Christmas 1998 buying frenzy, at which time, says 3Dfx, it should have over 400 games utilizing 3Dfx's APIs.