From owner-freebsd-multimedia  Sat Jan  3 15:17:05 1998
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To: multimedia@freebsd.org
Subject: Gack, again! 3DFX cards.
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 1998 15:16:58 -0800
Message-ID: <1503.883869418@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Sender: owner-freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org
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Well, I posted a nice 3 page message to freebsd-multimedia yesterday
which contained a complete synopsis of the 3DFX market as I was able
to determine it through browsing the web and talking to folks, but
then of course Majordomo ate it (along with a lot of other freebsd
mail yesterday) and I haven't the heart to type it all back in
again. :-(

To give you the short version this time: I'm interested in playing
with the 3DFX voodoo chipset and buying an add-on board for this (I'd
like to keep my Millenium, so I don't want a complete replacement VGA
card).  I've looked around and the major players seem to be Diamond,
with the Monster3D, Orchid with the Righteous 3D and Canopus with the
Pure3D card.  Of the 3, the Canopus product seems the most advanced,
with 4MB of texture memory vs the 2MB of the other cards (frame buffer
is still 2MB).  It's also fairly cheap at $179 street price, and
definitely seems to be the one to get if you can find one - Canopus
claims back-orders all through January so far.

Then there's the Voodoo2 chipset which 3DFX claims is 3X faster than
the Voodoo Rush, but I don't see any mfrs actually doing boards based
on them.  Any pointers?

Finally, anyone working on FreeBSD drivers for this so we can play
with Mesa and rendering things at high speed? :-)

Thanks!

					Jordan