3dfx Archive - Help Identificating this board please

gamma742 God Member Offline 3Dfx Gamer Posts: 1668 San Diego, CA USA Gender:	Re: Help Identificating this board please Reply #45 - 15.02.06 at 23:08:43 Am I mistaken or is it a voodoo2 card ???
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Obi-Wan_Kenobi

Ex Member

Re: Help Identificating this board please
Reply #46 - 16.02.06 at 01:11:31

well Gamma742 that the Piranha Wink

it has a Voodoo Graphics chipset aka Voodoo1 on it but with 3 TMU's instead of just one, these cards had a new value of 9K USD.

Gary has written something about these things earlier in this topic, as he writes the following:

"Since you seem to be interested in everything related to 3Dfx I just wandered if you were aware of Primary Image and their 3Dfx based products. These were by far the most advanced application of 3Dfx technology at the time. The cards were aimed at the visual simulation market and not consumers. I used to work for them and wrote pretty much all the drivers and software for their 3Dfx based products.

They rolled out Piranha (http://www.wave-report.com/1997_Wave_issues/wave723.html#723.12) in October 1997. This was a PCI board that had the following on it:
- an embedded Mips R5000 200MHz processor that ran an embedded version of Glide driven by the client side part of the Tempest scene manager, the srever sid ran on the PC. The client side did all the cull/draw calculations thus relieving the PC's CPU of this burdon and allowing multiple cards to be placed in a single PC (see below)
- a Voodoo 1 FBI with 3 TMU's (to my knowledge thie and the Baracuds are the only 3Dfx implementations by anyone to have 3 TMU's). This allowed for a tri-linear filtered base texture and a dithered trilinear filtered secondary texture, or even three dithered tri-linear textures in a single pass.
- A daughter card with another Voodoo 1 FBI with another 3 TMU's. This was used in SLI mode with the set on the base card.

The cards had a pixel bus connector system that allowed 2, 4 or 8 of them to be joined together and composited into a single channel to generate 2x, 4x or 8x rotated grid anti-aliasing. There were also tiling options so that half the cards could generate the left side of the screen and the other half the right side thus doubling the pixel fill rate and increasing the maximum resolution to 1280x1024. A second connector system was used to daisy chain the Pixel Clock, VSync and HSync signals, thus allowing mutliple channels to be video sychronized. Industrial PC's were used which had up to 20 PCI slots in a 19 inch 6U rack mount chassis. The PC was a single board computer (SBC) that plugged into the end slot. This sytem was developed almost 2 years before Quantum3D debuted their 3Dfx based AA offering. "

it's a long discription butthis is really what it was and yes FSAA x2,x4 and x8 wasn't a problem okay that was thanx to a pixel bus connecter placed in each card so they could be connected to 2, 4 or 8 units thereby the FSAA modes were possible and other strange things.

These Piranha cards could of been great rivals for Quantum3D.

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« Last Edit: 16.02.06 at 01:12:39 by N/A »

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gamma742 God Member Offline 3Dfx Gamer Posts: 1668 San Diego, CA USA Gender:	Re: Help Identificating this board please Reply #47 - 16.02.06 at 04:39:03 Well That's what I thought but look closely at the pics 500-0010-01 http://tdfx.de/stuff/pics/z3.jpg
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TM30 God Member Offline Posts: 1108 Germany Gender:	Re: Help Identificating this board please Reply #48 - 16.02.06 at 08:40:10 yeah you're right! There is 3x Bruce and one Chuck!
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Obi-Wan_Kenobi

Ex Member

Re: Help Identificating this board please
Reply #49 - 16.02.06 at 11:10:41

hmm then it's a Barracuda since the Voodoo1 chips were replaced by Voodoo2 chips, like Gary wrote over here:

In November 1998 Barracuda (http://www.wave-report.com/1998_Wave_issues/wave906.html#anchor197511 and http://www.primary-image.com/training_solutions/barracuda_design.htm) was released. This was similar to Piranha with the following updates - The Mips processor was upgraded to a 300MHz R7000. The Voodoo chips were upgraded to Voodoo 2, still 2 FBI and 6 TMU with the daughter card. An additional bus was added to optionally allow the geometry processing to be performed by a seperate card (called Cruncher) which had two 300MHz MIPS R7000's. The Cruncher would broadcast the polygon data to all the Barracuda's in a single channel by DMAing to a memory window. The local R7000 on each Barracuda would read the polygon data, add it's own local sub-pixel offset for anti-aliasing, then send the draw commands to the Voodoo 2 chips. A Galileo PCI bridge was added so that the 3Dfx graphics chips were visible on the PC's PCI bus (on Piranha the PC could not derectly access the Voodoo chips). Multi-card configuration options were the same as Piranha.

Primary Image had to stop using 3Dfx chips after Voodoo2 because 3Dfx signed there agreement with Quantum3D for them to be the sole source for later generations of 3Dfx based systems in the Visual Simulation field."

if iut ain't a Barracuda would it be a prototype of what the Barracuda could of been since that the Barracuda does have 6 TMU and 2FPU's this card has only 3 TMU's and 1 FPU so it might be a test model to see if more TMU's were capable.

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paulpsomiadis God Member Offline -=3Dfx still rox!=- Posts: 2011 Newcastle U.K. Gender:	Re: Help Identificating this board please Reply #50 - 17.02.06 at 01:46:53 WAAAAAAY KEWL! 8) It's just a cryin' shame that no-one can get hold of the drivers for this beast! I bet the image quality is dreamy!
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Obi-Wan_Kenobi Ex Member	Re: Help Identificating this board please Reply #51 - 17.02.06 at 01:50:30 Yeah sure would be L33Ty to experience that, but drivers should be somewhere, maybe useing 3rd party Voodoo2 drivers might work or some kinda Quantum3D Iron driver, just think'n out loud here lads.
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gamma742

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3Dfx Gamer

Posts: 1668
San Diego, CA USA
Gender: male

Re: Help Identificating this board please
Reply #52 - 17.02.06 at 03:35:11

Quote:

hmm then it's a Barracuda since the Voodoo1 chips were replaced by Voodoo2 chips, like Gary wrote over here:

if iut ain't a Barracuda would it be a prototype of what the Barracuda could of been since that the Barracuda does have 6 TMU and 2FPU's this card has only 3 TMU's and 1 FPU so it might be a test model to see if more TMU's were capable.

The design looks like the X-24. Maybe the other 1 + 3 chips are underneath the daughter card.

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Obi-Wan_Kenobi Ex Member	Re: Help Identificating this board please Reply #53 - 17.02.06 at 13:28:16 hmm yeah maybe anyways since the TMU's have BE on them which is a naming for Bruce right? and that single chip has CK aka Chuck so it should be a Barra
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Eye-Q God Member Offline Posts: 522 Germany Gender:	Re: Help Identificating this board please Reply #54 - 09.03.06 at 20:22:21 A better pic of that card: Klick to get to a big pic Really interesting card, it's interesting how these cards could have been "undercover" for such a long time.
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TM30 God Member Offline Posts: 1108 Germany Gender:	Re: Help Identificating this board please Reply #55 - 09.03.06 at 21:06:15 hm what kind of RAM is that? it looks like it is 8ns RAM!!! (think i can see a -8 in the second row)
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gdonovan YaBB Administrator Offline Infernal Collector Posts: 2361	Re: Help Identificating this board please Reply #56 - 09.03.06 at 23:32:38 125 mhz
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Obi-Wan_Kenobi Ex Member	Re: Help Identificating this board please Reply #57 - 10.03.06 at 01:14:19 hmm interesting looks loke SDRAM also EDO Ram are somewhat higher than SDRAM chips aren't they? a Voodoo2 with 3 Bruce Chips and 1 Chuck Chip odd stuff.
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gdonovan YaBB Administrator Offline Infernal Collector Posts: 2361	Re: Help Identificating this board please Reply #58 - 10.03.06 at 10:41:24 Quote: a Voodoo2 with 3 Bruce Chips and 1 Chuck Chip odd stuff. Single board SLI- 6 and 2.
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