Our good friends at MacTell have made official our rumor that they would be releasing a Mac Voodoo 3 video card. Unlike our prediction that the company would be relying on generic Mac drivers to be released by 3Dfx, MacTell has gone and developed their own that we are told will blow away the generic driver's performance. Also, MacTell has given the product a very cool name of EvilEye. According to MacTell:
Mactell Corporation today announced the latest addition to it's award winning line of 3D graphics accelerators, the Vision3D EvilEye™ series, a line of graphics acceleration cards based on the 3dfx Voodoo3® chip set.
Mactell continues its commitment to providing the fastest and most cost effective 2D and 3D graphics acceleration solutions for the Macintosh platform. EvilEye™ offers unprecedented support for all current 3D standards, including RaveTM, GlideTM, and OpenGLTM acceleration, which provides a single card solution for all the graphics acceleration needs of the Macintosh user.
EvilEye™ is capable of processing 100 billion instructions per second and the card's 350 MHz integrated RAMDAC (the industry's fastest) enables it to drive true color screen resolutions up to 2048X1536 at a full 75Hz screen refresh rate. The EvilEye™ series also breaks new ground by bringing the first 256 bit data path and the 3500 delivers a fill-rate of 333 Mtexels/ with True multi-texturing 2 textures per-pixel per-clock to the Macintosh platform. This eliminates bottlenecks and frees the graphics processor to provide blazingly fast redraws as well as support for ultra-high resolution displays on computer monitors, LCD flat panels, and HDTV.
MacTell's exclusive software is designed to optimize and utilize the vast processing capabilities of the Voodoo3 2000 and 3500 graphics processors for the Macintosh. The company is confident that its partnership with 3dfx Interactive® Inc. will provide Macintosh users with the fastest possible video card on the market.
Mactell will be unveiling the new Voodoo3 card for the first time this Wednesday at the MacWorld Expo in New York City, booth 867.
"We are excited that Mactell will be distributing the #1 selling Voodoo3 products to the Macintosh market" said Nathan Bozeman, 3dfx Interactive Inc. VP Product Marketing. "This agreement signals our growing commitment to deliver the 3dfx experience to 3D starved Mac users."
Pricing for the cards has been announced as follows:
EvilEye 200 will have a list price of US$179.99 with an ESP of US$149.99. The EvilEye 3500 will list US$249.99 with an ESP of US$229.99
The Mac Observer: Our original source, El Greco, proves to have been right on the money with his information (which we appreciate) with the exception of failing to mention that MacTell would be developing their own drivers for the card. This is extremely significant in terms of performance for Mac users. If we are to understand the numbers correctly, MacTell will be offering performance equal to that of what PC users will enjoy with Voodoo 3. MacTell has also been able to offer some of the best pricing the Mac market has seen yet on a Voodoo offering.
Also, with MacTell working directly with 3Dfx to provide these cards, we should have a topnotch gaming product that will continue to move the Mac forward as an excellent gaming choice. That's always important when it comes to earning the business of many young people who are not only represent the future, they also often drive their parents computing choices.
Any way you slice it, this is a great development for the Mac market. The Mac Observer offers a big congratulations to MacTell, 3Dfx, and Mac gamers everywhere!
An interesting aspect to this development will be whether secondhander Macheads will try and use MacTell's drivers on PC branded cards because of the US$20 savings or so. This has been an issue that plagued TechWorks and Micro Conversions in the past. Our thoughts are that if Mac gamers want to enjoy Mac supported products, they had better understand that economies of scale dictate that they must pay for that service. Even with a wildly successful Mac rollout, the overall Mac market is a fraction of what Diamond Multimedia or 3Dfx has access to in the PC world. That means that development costs for such things as Mac drivers are spread out among fewer cards.
MacTell
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