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 Price: $795 (direct from Quantum3D) Contact: Quantum3D, (408) 919-9999, www.quantum3d.com PROS: Studio plug-in for those who want it. For Quake II, it's fast... CONS: ...but not as fast as Voodoo2. Very expensive. 
There's been a lot of buzz about the possibility of adding two linked Voodoo2 boards for better performance and resolution. The technique is called SLI, or scan line interleave. Guess what: It's been done. Quantum3D has been shipping SLI-capable Voodoo boards for a number of months now.
The reason for the Obsidian 100SB's existence may be waning now that Voodoo2 is finally out, but it's an interesting exercise and may be a hint at what Quantum3D may be doing with Voodoo2. The Obsidian 100SB 4440 is two Voodoo boards linked by a PCI bridge chip on a single card in SLI mode with a whopping 20MB of RAM (4MB of frame buffer and 4MB for each of the four texture units). At $795, it's not cheap, but it is fast. Until the dual Voodoo2 setups were available, it was the only card to support multitextures in Quake II. The performance in Glide and Quake II was pretty impressive. Direct3D performance was less impressive, due to the lack of SLI support in DirectX 5; this will change with DirectX 6.0. Obsidian's target market for this card is arcade systems and 3D modelers. However, it was, for a time, the hottest card for Quake and the Quake-engine games, so Quantum3D made its boards available to the hard-core Quake set. It's over the top, but then the best usually is. Now we're waiting for the Obsidian "200" SB. - LC |
