The 'Avenger' graphics core was originally conceived immediately after Banshee. Due to quite staggering mismanagement by 3dfx, this caused the next-generation 'Rampage' project to suffer delays which would prove to be fatal to the entire company.

Avenger was pushed to the forefront as it offered a quicker time to market than the already delayed Rampage. Avenger was no more than the Banshee core with a second texture mapping unit (TMU) added - the same TMU which Banshee lost compared to Voodoo2. Avenger was thus merely a Voodoo2 with an integrated 128 bit 2D video accelerator and twice the clock speed.

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Much was made of Voodoo3 (as Avenger was christened) and its 16-bit only rendering. This was in fact quite complex, as Voodoo3 operated to full 32 bit precision (8 bits per channel, 16.7M colors) in its texture mappers and pixel pipeline as opposed to previous products from 3dfx and other vendors, which had only worked in 16 bit precision.

To save framebuffer space, the Voodoo3's rendering output was then dithered to 16 bit, which is fundamentally entirely different to (and much higher quality than) running the whole thing in 16 bit. However, the controversy came about over what happened next.

The Voodoo3's RAMDAC, which took the rendered frame from the framebuffer and generated the display image, performed a 2x2 box or 4x1 line filter on the dithered image to almost reconstruct the original 24 bit render. 3dfx claimed '22 bit' equivalent. The controversy began because most people relied on screenshots to compare image quality, yet Voodoo3's framebuffer (where a screenshot is taken from) is not the result put on screen. Therefore, screenshots did not accurately portray Voodoo3's display quality which was actually much closer to the 24 bit outputs of TNT2 and Rage128 but far, far faster. 32 bits cannot be output to a display, as the extra 8 bits are transparency information.

Performance

The Voodoo3 2000, 3000 and 3500 differed only in clock frequencies (memory and core were synchronous). The clock rates were 143MHz, 166MHz and 183MHz respectively on the Voodoo2 style 1x2 pixel pipeline. This gave the 3000 and 3500 a very significant advantage in multitextured fillrate over its main rival, the 125MHz TNT2, but the TNT2 had just under twice the single texturing fillrate of the Voodoo3.

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Modern (for the time) multitexturing games such as Quake3 and Unreal Tournament were almost exclusively Voodoo3 territory, a TNT2 even in its poor quality 16 bit mode couldn't keep up without overclocking. Older games, which made light use of multitexturing (such as Quake2 or Deus Ex) exposed Voodoo3's weak single texturing performance.

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Voodoo3 remained performance competitive throughout its life, eventually being comprehensively outclassed by GeForce 256.

In 1998, 3dfx released Voodoo's successor, the popular Voodoo2. The Voodoo2 was architecturally similar, but the basic board configuration added a second texturing unit, allowing two textures to be drawn in a single pass.

A problem with the Voodoo2 was the fact that it required three chips and a separate VGA graphics card, whereas new competing 3D products, such as the ATI Rage Pro, NVIDIA RIVA 128, and Rendition Verite 2200, were single-chip products. Despite this shortcoming, the card's dithered 16-bit 3D color rendering limitation, and an 800×600 resolution limitation, no other manufacturers' products could match the smooth framerates that the Voodoo2 produced. It was a landmark (and expensive) achievement in PC's 3D-graphics. Its excellent performance, and the mindshare gained from the original Voodoo Graphics, resulted in its success. Many users even preferred Voodoo2's dedicated purpose, because they were free to use the quality 2D card of their choice as a result. Some 2D/3D combined solutions at the time offered quite sub-par 2D quality and speed.

The arrival of the NVIDIA RIVA TNT with integrated 2D/3D chipset would offer minor challenge to the Voodoo2's supremacy months later.

SLI

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The Voodoo2 introduced Scan-Line Interleave (SLI) to the gaming market. In SLI mode, two Voodoo2 boards were connected together, each drawing half the scan lines of the screen. For the price of a second Voodoo2 board, users could essentially double their 3D throughput. A welcome result of SLI mode was an increase in the maximum resolution supported, now up to 1024×768. Despite the high cost and inconvenience of using three separate graphics cards, the Voodoo2 SLI scheme was clearly the pinnacle of gaming performance at the time.

SLI capability was not offered in subsequent 3dfx board designs, although the technology would be later used to link the VSA-100 chips on the Voodoo 5.

Having since acquired 3dfx, NVIDIA in 2004 reintroduced the SLI brand (now for Scalable Link Interface) in their GeForce 6 Series. ATI Technologies has also since introduced its own multi-chip implementation, dubbed 'CrossFire'. Although Scalable Link Interface and Crossfire operate on the original SLI principle, the algorithms used are now totally different.