No, its just going to be the equivalant of a standard V2 SLI setup, with 2d. And since the V3 will NOT have SLI capability, youre stuck with what you bought, with no easy upgrade option. If its really worth it to you to free up two pci slots, go ahead and wait. But if you dont want to wait, believe me, the SLI rig will perform at nearly the same speed as the v3 3000 is slated to.
IMHO, 3dfx is removing SLI from their products for now so that they can release it later when the V3 is no longer king of the hill. Once again consumers will rush to be the first to buy the "newest thing" from good-ole 3dfx.
Granted, I'm not going to go out and upgrade to a V3, the performance ain't there yet. It is however a good move on the part of 3dfx to sell one card that would do what it previously took three cards. (1) The world isn't made of just upgraders. (2) This means the next card from 3dfx (the V3 -4000) will absolutely be the king of the hill. Then I'll upgrade.
Well, atlest we know why they never added a second TMU to that bastard child, all they did was slap the second TMU on, shrink it down to .25 microns, and proclaim this improved banshee a V3.
Actually, it raises concerns that the banshee's limited fillrate has yet to uncover. Now, we all know the TNT is suffering from bandwidth problems, so im wondering what will happen with the V3. If they keep the single 128-bit bus design, those dual, 183mhz pipelines will clog up faster than you can type "timedemo". Im just wondering how they plan on dealing with the bandwidth problem. The SMA of the V2 made it easy, and the Banshee never had a chance of clogging that 128-bit bus.
I don't think I would consider V3 THE greatest video card like you say. I would still prefer a TNT or Rage128 because they both offer AGP texturing, 32-bit rendering, and much better image quality. I do admit that it will be very cool to have Quake 2 screaming at all resolutions, but I'm happy with 40fps at 1024x768 with a TNT.
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