At last year's E3 Expo, 3dfx had a huge, two-story display area. This year at the show, they just took over a few closed meeting rooms in the corner of one of the show floors. We were surprised at how few 3dfx cards there were on the show floor. The only machine outside of 3dfx's rooms that we know held a Voodoo5 was located in 3DO's booth. It was running Legends of Might and Magic, and the only reason we knew it had a Voodoo5 in it was because a developer we spoke with said so, rather proudly we might add. If you were to diagnose 3dfx's current delivery schedule accuracy by the number of Voodoo5 cards running around, you would likely not give a good prognosis.

When we visited 3dfx, we were first greeted with an Alpha Voodoo5 6000. After a few "oohs" and "aahs", we sat down for the show. The board is a monster, carrying four fans and occupying more PCB space than you can shake a texel at. Powering the card was a massive external power supply the size of two thick paperback books stuck cover to cover.

In an attempt to knock our socks off, 3dfx then showcased Quake III Arena demo001 running at 2048x1536x16bpp on the Voodoo5 6000. All quality and geometry settings were at their fullest, including trilinear filtering, though it was not 32-bit, AA was off and we did not see whether the detail settings, like shell casings and wall marks, were on or off. The card just blazed through the demo. We estimated it ran at 40-50fps, while 3dfx said it was closer to 60. Either way, the score is impressive. If the board ships at the current estimate of 166MHz graphics clock, pixel fillrate would peak out around 1.3 Gigapixels/per/second - over half a million pixels more than the GeForce2 GTS - but a shipping timeframe for this product is still not on the immediate horizon.