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 by Loyd Case and Dave Salvator
My, how time flies. Since then, the Voodoo (and now the Voodoo2) has become the 3D accelerator chip of choice. Still, some 2D/3D combo cards are exceeding the performance and equaling the image quality of 3Dfx Voodoo cards, as are some of the chipsets on the horizon (more on that later). In this roundup, we take a good look at the Real3D Starfighter, the first of what will be a legion of cards using Intel's new 740 graphics chip - the 740 raises the bar for all chipmakers and anyone coming out with something new had better look as good and run at least as fast as the 740. We also home in on Voodoo2 by checking out Creative Labs' 12MB card. And a number of other cards are put through the wringer with both synthetic and real game benchmarks. For the most part, we tested Direct3D performance, although we did test OpenGL performance on the few cards that could muster support for the GL Quake subset of OpenGL. All of these cards have some merit - in fact, we would have killed to have any of them 18 months ago. It's a mark of the times that some cards, thought to be very fast only a few months ago, are beginning to look like also-rans. So let's dive into the hardware and take a look at what this crop of second-generation cards actually delivers.
Next: Creative Labs' 3D Blaster Voodoo2 |
