Voodoo2s Gain Memory, But to What End?

In the past year, the 3D accelerator market has completely taken off with better products, higher resolutions, and every 3D maker saying it has the best board.

In the gaming community, the clear-cut 3D-only accelerator of choice is the 3Dfx Voodoo graphics chipset. When 3Dfx announced its Voodoo2 chipset, vendors big and small announced support for the chip, and gamers everywhere waited in earnest for the boards to release.

Now that Voodoo2 cards are shipping, gamers have moved from asking, "What chipset do I want?" to "Should I buy an 8MB or 12MB board?" Strangely, the answer may not be that clear cut. Rather then speculate on what we think is better, GameSpot News went right to the source - game developers - to ask them what they would buy and will that 4MB of extra texture memory contained in the 12MB board be that big a deal as new games are released?

We spoke to Michael Harrington, director of development at Valve Software (of upcoming Half-Life fame), about what he thought about the 12MB board?

Harrington initially started off by saying that no matter what, more memory is always a good thing. Citing the relatively minor price differences between the 8MB and 12MB board, he said, "I'd have a hard time not buying a 12MB board."

"We take advantage of everything that the Voodoo does, and having the extra memory will only make Half-Life run better," he said. "With Half-Life, we already use more than 2MB of textures, so any additional texture memory is a welcome addition." Although Half-Life runs very well on the first breed of Voodoo boards, it will run marginally better on a board with more breathing room for textures.

So what about upcoming titles?

"I believe that as AGP comes up, more developers will move to put more textures onto the larger texture memory," Harrington said. "We're texture rich. The more textures we can hold in memory, the faster the game is going to be."

GameSpot News also spoke with Craig Lafferty, public relations manager from Epic Megagames, to find out which configuration he would choose. Since Epic is getting closer to releasing its beautiful first-person shooter Unreal, the Voodoo2 should only add to the overall visual quality of the game.

Lafferty said, "Unreal will take advantage of the Voodoo 2 as the multitexture support gets double the speed when rendering textures and lightmaps together. Also, because of the way the Voodoo2 handles lighting, Unreal looks even more vibrant."

When we asked him about the 8MB vs. 12MB question, he replied, "The issue of going with 8 MB or 12 MB is down to money. If the user has the money, it may be worth it to go with a 12MB card, but in the immediate future gamers are not going to see a huge jump in speed or performance with 12 MB vs. 8 MB." In the case of his upcoming game, he said that the visuals would be improved with a Voodoo2 card, but it won't matter if the player has a 8MB or a 12MB card.

Still confused? At this stage, you can't go wrong with either board. It comes down to money and what you want. Although both developers didn't really know which card their next projects would support, it appears that developers will more then likely support the 8MB Voodoo2 boards first and wait to see what gamers actually buy before they start supporting 12MB boards.