My guess would be that it was running at approximately
25-30fps, now 3Dfx has already had the Voodoo3 running at those speeds and greater, but
NOT with 32bits-color depth.
This is where things were starting to get interesting, because the next thing was showed
was a demo by nVidia. It was a fly by scene of a city running with 24bits Z-buffer
accuracy and using 2048*2048pixels sized textures, the scene didn’t look very special
until Jan zoomed in a bit, and we we’re looking at the rooftop and a penthouse on one
of the skyscrapers. The scene was beautifully rendered with a pool of water and furniture.
Then he zoomed in even further onto a statue of a lions head, he kept zooming even
closer and as we were getting even closer I suddenly noticed a bee on the nose of the
lion, he kept zooming in even closer until we were looking at one of the feelers of the
bee, even that was extremely well detailed (it even had tiny "hair" on it!!).
The third and last demo we were showed was a flight-simish demo of a rendered view of
San Francisco as seen in Microsofts flightsims, what differed from the Microsoft games was
the fact that almost every house was rendered, not only a few famous buildings.
This was to demonstrate the use of a 24Bit Z-buffer. When using the full 24-bit Z-buffer
the scene was rendered beautifully, but when we switched over to a 16-bit Z-buffer the
scene suffered from heavy tearing and several houses even disappeared.
This was Creatives and nVidias way of showing the use of high resolution textures, and
it really got you thinking about 3Dfx’s textures size limit of 256*256 pixels, 3Dfx
better got some thing really cool up their sleeve and stop focusing on fillrate and ignore
image-quality.
We got the exclusive opportunity of taking some pictures of the TNT2 alpha-board, you
can view those on the last page of the preview!
