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There are 23 boards representing the six leading 3D graphics chips currently on the market. Here they are, in no particular order:
Voodoo3
Running games in 16-bit mode, the Voodoo3 boards are price-performance leaders, even though they're edged out by one or two TNT2 boards. But you can get the Voodoo3/3000 for $150 and the 2000 for $110 - and there are PCI 2000s available, too.
TNT2/Vanta The TNT2 is available in two flavors: standard and ultra. The standard part specs out at 125MHz core clock and 150MHz memory clock; the ultra is rated at 150/183. However, it should be noted that these specs are for zero airflow in an enclosed case. Adding a fan and additional case changes things a bit. The various board vendors have taken different approaches to the clock-rate game. We'll take a look at how each board handles this issue in the minireviews. The Vanta is a TNT2 core with a 64-bit memory interface. There are actually two versions of the Vanta - the Vanta and the model 64. Like the TNT2, the difference is the clock rate. The Vanta runs at 100MHz core/125MHz memory. The 64 runs at 125/150. Both are targeted towards business users more than gamers. The TNT2 cards are all quite speedy in Direct3D and OpenGL. The latest set of reference drivers has improved performance by a serious margin. Note that the TNT2 does draw a fair amount of power, so older motherboards may have problems. TNT2 boards also haven't run as well in AMD K6-2 and K6-3 systems, but most of those problems have been ironed out. Note that users with ALi chipsets may need to get a BIOS and AGP driver update. |
Because of its Voodoo heritage, Voodoo3 has some limitations. First, the twin pipelines are not available in Direct3D games unless the game uses multitexturing. Voodoo3 makes up for this to some extent by clocking the chip up - the slowest is the model 2000, at 143MHz. Second, there's no support for 32-bit rendering in 3D. To compensate somewhat, Voodoo3 cards perform a bit of postfiltering at the RAMDAC. This blurs the image ever so slightly but does a good job of removing artifacts like banding. Voodoo3 is also limited to 16MB of RAM, but since it can't do 32-bit anyway, this isn't the limitation that it seems.
Of the cards tested, only Voodoo3 fully supports 3dfx's Glide API (although Creative Labs is attempting to ship a Glide emulator, with mixed results). Glide is increasingly less important over time, but there are still a number of excellent titles on the shelf that only support Glide. Some games that support other APIs in addition to Glide still run better with Glide. However, that gap is closing. There's very little difference in some games between Glide and Direct3. The most startling thing was watching Unreal's massive improvements in Direct3D performance, to the point that even Voodoo3 running in Direct3D mode only trailed Glide by 3fps.
