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Lucky for Macintosh lovers, Apple adopted the PCI standard for its Macintosh machines a couple of years ago, making it possible for the scores of PC-compatible 3D-accelerator boards that followed to be plugged into Macintosh PCI slots. Now, just because a board can be plugged into the Macintosh doesn't mean that it's automatically going to work there; besides the slot, one needs a Macintosh code library that implements one of the standards that the board is compatible with and then a game that is compatible with that standard.
But Glide is the one you really care about. 3Dfx has released a Glide implementation for the Mac and any card that uses 3Dfx's Voodoo Graphics chipset (sometimes called "Voodoo 1") supports it - that's a lot of cards. Unfortunately, 3Dfx does not support this implementation and is discouraging its use; if you don't like using unsupported drivers for your 3D, you can purchase MacMagic, a Mac-native 8M Voodoo 1 card from Villagetronics, for $99, or ArcadeFX, also with Voodoo 1 but with only 4M of RAM, from Best Data, for $119. If you want even more power (and of course you do) you'll want Voodoo 2, and Voodoo Banshee, 3Dfx's latest high-performance chipsets. Micro Conversions' Game Wizard, flying off the shelves left and right, is based on the Voodoo 2 chipset. The first version of this board had 8M and would have set you back a good $300 or so, but the latest announced configuration is $100 cheaper and ups the memory to 12M. Micro Conversions even claims that you will soon be able to take advantage of the "SLI" feature of the Voodoo 2 chip set. That let's you place two Game Wizard boards in two different slots on your Macintosh and have them share the work of rendering. We've heard that you can get those 45-55 frames per second in 1024x768 with SLI. We'll have to wait and see. In the mean time, there are rumors of Mac drivers for Best Data's Voodoo 2-based ArcadeFXII card, while VillageTronics has announced a new MacMagic Pro board based on the Voodoo Banshee chipset, 3Dfx's combined 2D/3D solution, and is expected to ship it towards the beginning of '99, and sell it for $300." What about the games? There is a growing number of 3D-accelerated games for the Macintosh; all support either RAVE or Glide. The most important is probably the visually stunning Unreal, which has just been released for the Macintosh, only a couple of months after its appearance on the PC. Unreal is pretty much the state of the art for PC 3D graphics. And Mac 3D graphics, it turns out. Unreal will function very well on a fast Power Mac with a Voodoo-based 3D accelerator - we've seen frame rates up in the 30s in 640x480 resolution. You can also expect to get high frame rates with a better ATI Rage board, like the ATI Xclaim 3D, based on the Rage Pro chipset.
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