Press Releases 3D Emotion

FEBRUARY 1998

California Graphics’ 3D Emotion
Taking the gaming world by storm

California Graphics, the specialist in 3D hardware for games, announces a new lower price on its tremendously popular 3D Emotion PCI graphics card. Based on the highly popular 3Dfx Voodoo Rush 3D accelerator, it brings real three-dimensional gaming from the arcade to the desktop. "The 3D Emotion has had a great response from the buying public because of its incredible combination of unique features, high performance, and quality manufacturing design," said Vincenzo Coccoli, Chairman and CEO of California Graphics. "This card bundles fast 128 bit 2D graphics and 3D acceleration from industry leader 3Dfx along with quality TV output for bigger screen enjoyment, all in a single card! The 3D Emotion has been considered by reviewers to be an awesome value already. Now, with an even lower price, it sets a new standard in that category." This high performance, 2D and 3D graphics card delivers resolutions of 1600x1200 and 1280x1024 in 65,536 colours, with a performance in Ziff-Davis’ 3D Winbench 97 of 183*.
"Early on, the Voodoo Rush boards from some other manufacturers gained a bad reputation because of their choice of the other chips to go on the board and their board designs," added Mr Coccoli. "Our unique choice of the 3Dfx Interactive Voodoo Rush accelerator and the Alliance Semiconductors’ ProMotion-AT 25 accelerator has proved itself to be an excellent combination with thousands of pleased users."
The 3D Emotion not only gives leading edge 2D and 3D graphics on a single card, but it also enables users to benefit from the vast number of 3Dfx enhanced game titles that are out on the market as well as those being developed for the future by over 300 developers who have joined the 3Dfx development program.
"The ante is continuing to be upped with upcoming releases like Battlezone and Falcon 4.0," commented Greg Moeller, Head of California Graphics’ USA Operations. "3Dfx enhanced titles are designed to milk every bit of power, speed and 3D effects capability out of 3Dfx hardware and are considered by many to represent the best 3D games the software industry has to offer. For example: Wing Commander Prophecy, Turok Dinosaur Hunter, Andretti Racing, MDK, EF 2000 2.0 and Heavy Gear. Top developers like as Microsoft, Psygnosis, Sega Interactive, Activision, Virgin Interactive, and Electronic Arts are all developing with 3Dfx hardware in mind. Owning a card like our 3D Emotion not only allows one to run general software titles written for DirectX/Direct 3D and DOS apps, but an awesome quantity of superb 3Dfx enhanced ones as well. It really is the best of both worlds.
"I think our choice of the Voodoo Rush chipset was very forward looking. In the design phase, we had the choice of either making a stand alone 3D add-on card with a 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics chip, or a much more capable card. Our 3D Emotion is able to provide 3D acceleration in a window supporting popular titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator ’98. Stand-alone Voodoo Graphics cards are limited to full screen 3D acceleration only -- as are the upcoming Voodoo² cards. That, coupled with its greater resolution capability -- most Voodoo graphics cards are limited to 640x480 in 3D and its single slot TV-Out design, has made it a real winner. There was another reason however, (although we could not talk about it at the time), we already had it in our plans to design and make graphics cards featuring the then future Voodoo² chipset. We knew that people buying separate 3D cards with Voodoo graphics chipsets would have to, in essence, throw them away once they decided to upgrade to Voodoo², but, with the 3D Emotion, that is not the case. The graphics output of the 3D Emotion can be split into three categories: 2D, 3D in a window, and 3D fullscreen. Of these, only the 3D full screen is replaced once a person upgrades to Voodoo² leaving the other two thirds of the card to still be used. It actually fills a gap that the Voodoo² can not fill, i.e. 3D acceleration in windowed applications.
"This is why many serious gamers are considering using the 3D Emotion as a primary card together with our upcoming Voodoo² 3D Wizard cards. Together, they provide the most comprehensive 3Dfx 3D acceleration package possible. However, for those that don’t consider themselves to be such serious gamers, it provides a fantastic way to provide great 2D and 3Dfx 3D at an incredibly low price. Later they can upgrade by purchasing one of our higher end 3D Wizard Voodoo² cards while retaining the use of two thirds of their 3D Emotion card. They won’t have to repurchase software either, as all the 3Dfx enhanced software they buy will run on the 3D Wizard cards as well. It really is a great package for the consumer!"

The Chipset
The 3D Emotion uses a 3Dfx Voodoo Rush 3D graphics chipset, Alliance Semiconductors’ high performance 128-bit ProMotion AT25 2D accelerator and integrates a 175MHz RAMDAC giving very stable refresh rates up to 200 Hz.
The Voodoo Rush uses a triangle-based graphics engine as the basis for both object rendering and texture mapping. It derives the parameters needed for its triangle engine internally. This frees the CPU from calculating these parameters and eliminates the need to transfer them over the PCI bus.
The Voodoo Rush uses a 64-bit "VR" interface, which was jointly developed with Alliance Semiconductors, to connect to the ProMotion AT25 2D graphics accelerator and the shared memory buffer. The 2D graphics accelerator provides ordinary DOS and Windows functionality, while passing 3D rendering commands to Voodoo Rush through a shared-memory command buffer. Voodoo Rush then renders the commands directly to the shared frame buffer memory. This shared-memory approach gives a simpler and more affordable interface, and reduces the total amount of display memory required. In a Voodoo Rush system, 3D games can be played full-screen or in a window, unlike stand-alone 3D subsystems that generally allow only full-screen game play.
The card has a 45 Mpixels/sec sustained fill rate for bi-linear and tri-linear filtered textures with LOD (Level Of Detail) MIP-mapping, Z-buffering, alpha-blending and fogging. Its innovative advanced 3D functions include depth buffering (16-bit linear, 22-bit effective), texture compositing, morphing, animation, linear frame buffer access, and per-pixel special effects such as fog, transparency, and translucency.
TV output is handled by a Chrontel CH7002. This high quality encoder converts VGA signals into NTSC or PAL TV format with a special flicker filter, enabling images to be displayed simultaneously on a monitor and a TV screen. There is also S-Video output from the card to give the highest possible quality of TV display.

Industry standard API support
Microsoft’s Direct3D and 3Dfx Glide APIs are supported as are Criterion Renderware, OpenGL, and Apple Quickdraw 3D RAVE API’s. VESA VBE 2.0 is supported for superb DOS games performance.

Pricing
This level of realism requires considerable amounts of fast access memory on the card and hence the 3D Emotion is supplied with 6 MB of single cycle 30ns EDO DRAM, which is divided into 4MB of frame buffer memory and 2MB of texture buffer memory. The 3D Emotion street price is in the region of just US$179 (£105).

Resolution

Resolution

Colours

Refresh Rates max

640x480

256

65k

16M

200 Hz

800x600

256

65k

16M

160 Hz

120 Hz

1024x768

256

65k

16M

100 Hz

85 Hz

1152x864

256

65k

16M

85 Hz

75 Hz

1280x1024

256

65k

85 Hz

75 Hz

1600x1200

256

65k

75 Hz

60 Hz

Additional information

ProMotion-AT25
The ProMotion-AT25 is a high-performance integrated 2D and video accelerator. It incorporates an advanced rendering engine with a powerful Windows graphical user interface accelerator engine, unique motion video acceleration hardware and a high-precision DAC and clock generator all in a single package.
The chip’s 128-bit internal architecture and ultra high performance memory interface give the AT25 a superior performance for a low-cost mainstream Windows accelerator. A hardware scaler with bi-linear filter and full line buffer smoothly scales playback or capture windows from native size up to full screen at full speed.

* Ziff-Davis 3D Winbench 97 test run on Windows 95 with 3D Emotion driver version4.10.00.2059; Power Pro II AGP motherboard; 32MB RAM (2x16 MB DIMM); Intel Pentium II 300MHz CPU; 2.1 GB Fireball hard disk and Samsung 8x CD-ROM.

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