3Dfx Interactive, the company known best for its 3D accelerated powerhouse Voodoo series of chips, announced final specifications for its upcoming Voodoo3 boards. While it was happy to talk about the chip's performance and specs, the company has yet to announce a specific date for when gamers will actually be able to get their hands on one. The official company line is that the release is just weeks away and just like you - we hate to wait.

　　The major change 3Dfx's Voodoo3 brings to gamers is that this will be the first time that the company actually builds its own boards. Previously, the company has sold chips to vendors who in turn have built boards using the chips and sold them to retailers and OEM computer manufacturers. Since that time, 3Dfx has moved to buy STB, a card maker with big branches into the OEM market. This gives 3Dfx more stringent control of its products and the company admits that it has enabled it to bring the Voodoo3 to market much more rapidly than it originally planned. And getting it into the PCI and AGP slots of gamers is what it is all about.

　　Voodoo3 will come in three flavors this time to help the company focus on the needs and wallets of gamers and other consumers. Gone are the SLI setups of the Voodoo2 and the combined 2D and 3D capabilities of the Voodoo Banshee. The Voodoo3 pulls in all the powers of 3Dfx's line of products into one and brings them to a new level.

　　The Voodoo3 2000 runs at 143MHz and will come in both AGP and PCI versions for US$129.99. While this is at the low end of the offerings, my no means is it underpowered. It is expected to pump out six million triangles and 286 Megatexels per second at a max resolution of 2,048x1,536 with a 300MHz RAMDAC and 16MB SDRAM.

　　The Voodoo3 3000 runs at 166MHz for AGP for $179.99. Focused on mainstream gamers, the 3000 is expected to generate seven million triangles and 333 Megatexels per second at a max resolution of 2,048x1,536 with a fast 350 RAMDAC and 16MB SDRAM. The 3000 will also come equipped with TV output and S-video port so gamers who hate being limited to the small monitor can break out to their larger TVs.

　　3Dfx remembers those extreme gamers who bought two Voodoo2 boards just to get the most extreme speed out of their hottest games; the company's Voodoo3 3500 is the next upgrade for those gamers. The 3500 AGP runs at 183MHz will push the limits with up to eight million triangles and 366 Megatexels per second with a max resolution of 2,048x1,536 with a 350MHz RAMDAC, TV/S-Video output, and fast 16MB SGRAM. For those gamers with a little extra money who own flat-panel displays, the 3500's LCDfx will help to bring Voodoo power to the flat panel. The 3500 will sell for $249.99.

　　Officially, Babbages and EB will start taking orders (in retail and online sites) for the Voodoo3 boards on Friday, and CompUSA will soon follow in their ranks by offering similar preorder programs. We know that EB was already running a preorder program way before Friday. When we spoke to 3Dfx, a spokesperson said that it didn't mind EB taking orders early.

　　The one major question we asked 3Dfx was why use only 16MB while 3Dfx's competitors are planning on equipping their boards with 32MB of RAM? After analyzing the market, 3Dfx determined that 16MB was sufficient for most applications and very few programs would benefit from 32MB. The company also wanted to make the boards available at a low price point, and the addition of an extra 16MB would have increased the cost of the board.

　　Other features of the board include single-pass single-cycle multitexturing for bump mapping and trilinear MIP-mapping, dual 32-bit internal rendering, per-pixel MIP-mapping, sub-pixel and sub-texel correction, 8-bit palletized textures, programmable exponential fog tables, Gouraud shading, a full 128-bit 2D accelerator, DVD hardware assist, and support for DirectX, Glide, and OpenGL. And it will

　　One thing is certain, everybody is talking about the third coming of Voodoo. 3Dfx has supplied the latest Quake II numbers that show the chip running a Quake II time demo at 106 frames per second at 800x600, over 84fps at 1,024x768, and 35fps at 1600x1200. At speeds like this, the cost of buying a 21-inch monitor for ultimate gaming may not be that alien a possibility.