After generating far more buzz on the Web than any other chipset, 3Dfx Interactive announced on Monday its newest in the line of 3D graphics chips, the Voodoo 2.

　　Initially expected by the end of '97, the chip will be introduced for public consumption in the first quarter of 1998 at US$300.

　　So what kind of performance increase will gamers expect to see? The Voodoo 2 will have an expandable architecture with a base configuration of 192-bit memory architecture and 2.2 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth, which will deliver over 50 billion operations per second (BOPS). It will push out an amazing 3 million triangles per second and 90 million dual-textured, bilinear-filtered, per pixel MIP-mapped, alpha-blended, Z-buffered pixels per second - in layman's terms, this is three times faster then the current Voodoo Graphics chipset.

　　New to the series will be AGP support, which will give gamers use of the higher bandwidth of the AGP bus and will support 3D game resolutions of up to 1024x768. Also, the Voodoo 2 will contain a full floating-point hardware triangle setup unit for maximum triangle throughput on Pentium, Pentium Pro, and Pentium II powered systems.

　　"We believe that Voodoo 2 will not only change the way people play games, but the way that people design games," said Greg Ballard, president and CEO of 3Dfx Interactive. "The original Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo Rush chipsets opened people's eyes to the possibilities of 3D gaming and the response has been overwhelming. We have once again set the standard by which all other 3D accelerators will be judged."

　　Unchanged for the series will be full compatibility with Microsoft's Direct3D, 3Dfx's Glide, and OpenGL APIs so games written under these application libraries will run on the next generation chipset. And it makes it so gamers won't have to worry about having to buy newer versions of their software or waiting for downloadable patches to see the speed and graphic increase in boards using the Voodoo 2.

　　Two new technologies have been added that previously were only available to arcade customers. The basic chip has two texture processing units that simultaneously apply two textures to a triangle for single-pass, single-cycle rendering of effects like trilinear filtering, sophisticated lighting, spotlights, and detail texturing. Dual texture units will double the texture fill rate and will rocket games like Quake or Quake 2 up to 110 frames per second (yes, I felt dizzy with joy when I read this too).

　　One new technology, Scanline Interleave mode (SLI), allows you to purchase a second Voodoo 2 board and connect the two for even faster gameplay. The technology is simple: The lines of a screen are broken into odds and evens. While the first board processes the evens, the other processes the odds. Effectively allowing each processor to work at half its capacity at double the speed. If you can afford such a setup, you'll have a 384-bit memory architecture with 4.3 gigabyte per second memory bandwidth with an output of over 180 million pixels per second.

　　As more information trickles out of 3Dfx about the new Voodoo 2, we'll relay it to to you.