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It would appear that both Guillemot and ELSA are going to compete for 'first out of the blocks' bragging rights for the new nVidia card. ELSA told COMBATSIM that they intend to have a 64MB card available this summer. We will see what they submit for the upcoming video card shootout. The press kits for 3Dfx and nVidia were both loaded with pictures and specifications. You won't see any of that quoted by me. It just doesn't matter. Performance is in the eye of the beholder, not on a spec sheet. The GeForce 2 GTS is a beauty to behold at that. All the manufacturers we spoke with said their new cards would include a fan on the GPU. Guillemot plans to equip the memory on their 64MB board with heat sinks (can you say overclock?).
The new GTS cards from Guillemot, ELSA, Diamond, and Savage are all powered by the newest nVidia chip. The new board will come in three flavors to start with: 32MB DDR memory for the AGP slot or the same for a PCI slot, and a 64MB DDR memory in the AGP slot. The move to a PCI board will permit the use of the card in PC workstations that are not equipped with AGP slots. Since the nVidia architecture makes full use of the AGP bus expanded memory and higher data transfer rates, it will be interesting to see how much of a performance hit the PCI slot version takes.
Nevertheless, all will run the most powerful single GPU chip available today. Our shootout will determine who has bragging rights for the best combat simulation video card. There is no competition against nVidia's chip one-on-one.
The Voodoo5 5500 from 3dfx is the next stage in the evolution of the Voodoo product line. Utilizing a scalable architecture, the Voodoo5 5500 features dual 3dfx VSA-100 chips for more 3D horsepower. Working in parallel, these processors produce over 667 Megatexels per second and provide 32-bit color support. Voodoo5 introduces in-hardware Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA), the T-Buffer Digital Cinematic Effects engine, up to 128MB of graphics memory for top performance, and support for 2D resolutions as high as 2048x1536 (mommy, I need a new monitor). FSAA will breath new life into some older simulations. I saw a Falcon 4.0 demo that I would have sworn was running 32 bit textures.
