Because none of you are actually LISTENING to me. You're too busy trying to convince me how I must be wrong because you guys think differently.
I have a degree in Computer Science because I've taken programming classes, programming algorithms, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE. I've also studied Electrical Engineering in college, including circuit design. I also know the steps the Voodoo2 has to take in the data path in order to generate the 3D image and you guys are simply ignoring me instead of even remotely trying to pay attention.
The card has to RENDER THE IMAGE IN MEMORY so that the drawing rasterizer has something in memory to generate the pixels from. The screen you are looking at is drawn one pixel at a time, in lengthwise order, usually from right to left on the screen, The lines of data include a start and stop code, plus the wait time the monitor needs in the data stream before it begins drawing the next line up with the next start code. The graphics card receives the data to render the image via the PCI bus from the CPU, having already been corrected for view position, lighting, vertex positions, and everything else the CPU has to do to the data before the Voodoo card can render the image. The CARD has to take the vertex points and plot the surfaces out in a virtual 3d environment so that it has something to work with in terms of applying textures to the surfaces and distances from the camera - all so that the framebuffer can be loaded with a stream of pixels, again calculated via distance from viewpoint, position relative to viewpoint, and angle from viewpoint. What the hell do you guys think those three big-ass chips on the Voodoo2 card is doing? Juggling numbers? And don't forget the Gendac ship. It's a clock generator and a DAC in order to convert all those digital pixels into an analog signal for the monitor to use.
But I WILL stipulate to one thing. If the remaining 4MB is specifically for the Framebuffer and not being used entirely for media rendering, then it is possible that the stream of pixels (which will be different per V2 card) is waiting inside that framebuffer for the GENDAC chip to send to the monitor - in which case the framebuffer would NOT hold identical information per card. But the video card has to have a place to save where all the pixels are in the frame and that wouldn't necessarily need all 4MB. The Voodoo1 cards had 2MB of framebuffer and could do the job, including the pixels. But BOTH Voodoo2 cards still have to have the exact same frame to render. They're just not drawing the same pixel stream. And I'm sitting here getting tired of trying to argue with people who are more interested in arguing with me and don't actually BACK UP THEIR ARGUMENTS. We've got people in this thread who don't even know how the Voodoo2 SLI setup works trying to talk! I'm done. I'm not coming back to this thread again.