The Voodoo 2 was a graphics processing unit (GPU) made by 3dfx. The Voodoo2 was released in February 1998 as a replacement for the Voodoo1. The Voodoo2 boosted the core clock-rate from 50MHz to 90MHz, increased the memory bus from 128-bit to 192-bit, and increased texture and framebuffer memory support (up to 8 MB texture / 4 MB frame buffer compared to the Voodoo's 4 MB texture / 2 MB frame buffer.) The larger framebuffer supported a maximum screen resolution of 800x600, while the increased texture-memory allowed more detailed textures.

In a seeming contradiction of Moore's Law, Voodoo2 had an increased chip-count (of 3) compared to the two-chip Voodoo1. Competing products such as the ATI Rage Pro, NVIDIA Riva 128, and Rendition Verite2200 were single-chip products with integrated 2D/VGA cores. The Voodoo2's third chip was a second TMU (texture map unit), which allowed a second texture to be drawn during the same pass, with no performance penalty. At time of introduction, Voodoo 2 was the only 3D-card capable of single-cycle dual-texturing. Of course, usage of the Voodoo2's second TMU depended on application software; Quake II exploited dual-texturing to great effect. The Voodoo2 also inherited the Voodoo 1's usage model: it was a strictly 3D-only card and required the same external pass-through cabling familiar to owners of the Voodoo 1.

Finally, the Voodoo2 introduced Scan-Line Interleave (SLI) capability to the consumer PC market. (The Voodoo1 also had SLI capability, but it was only used in the arcade and professional markets.) In SLI-mode, two Voodoo boards were installed in a PC and ran in parallel, with each unit drawing half the lines of the display. Voodoo2 SLI not only doubled rendering throughput, but also increased the maximum supported screen-resolution to a then-impressive 1024×768.

In 1999, 3DFX released the Voodoo 3, which effectively replaced the Voodoo 2 as the company's top-performing product. The Voodoo 3 was essentially a Voodoo 2 SLI on a single board with the addition of the 2D unit from the failed Banshee.

Specifications

• Voodoo2 (V2 1000) 90MHz clock (memory and core)
• 135 MHz RAMDAC, 16-bit (65536 color) display
• 90 Mpixels/sec sustained fill rate for bilinear textures
• LOD MIP-mapping
• Z-buffering
• alpha-blending and fogging

Graphics cards

Voodoo 2 | voodoo 2 | Voodoo 2