Banshee Debut at ECTS

If you wander around to many of the booths at the show, you may notice game demos running on 3Dfx gear. Guess what? They might not be Voodoo2 cards.

Scattered around the show are a number of 3Dfx Banshee boards. According to Steve Schick, one of 3Dfx's PR people, Banshee boards were seeded to a number of developers. "We're seeing Direct3D performance faster than Voodoo2 in some cases," Shick noted. "But multitexture still runs faster on Voodoo2."

Banshee is 3Dfx's attempt to break into the market for combination 2D/3D graphics chips. A single-chip solution (unlike the ill-fated Voodoo Rush), the Banshee's 3D core is essentially the same as Voodoo2, sans one TMU (texture management unit). Also unlike Voodoo2, Banshee supports a unified memory access method - there's no longer segregation between the frame buffer and texture memory. "A single memory pool allows us to do some neat effects like rendering a scene, then taking that rendered scene and rerendering it as an environment map on a reflective surface," Shick commented.

Companies like Diamond, Creative Labs, Guillemot, Wicked3D, and Quantum3D have all announced boards using the Banshee chip. So far, only Creative Labs has announced an 8MB board; all the other companies will be shipping 16MB boards. Typical prices announced so far range from US$129 (after rebate) for the Guillemot Phoenix to $159 for the Diamond Monster Fusion with 16MB of SGRAM.