Highs & lows

The Voodoo3 being a 3dfx card has some rather unique features, & some missing features. The Highs being;

• Glide support
• Excellent overclocking abilities
• High software compatibility & works on most platforms (e.g. Mac, Linux, Windows 9x & NT)
• 350Mhz RAMDAC for high refresh rates
• Excellent 16-bit image quality (plus the additional rendering options)
• Speed
• Stability

The Lows being;

• Lack of 32-bit rendering (externally at least)
• Limited to 256*256 texture sizes
• Opengl driver needs some work
• Some incompatibilities (usually patches available to fix this however)

To be perfectly honest the most important low (for me) would be the limited texture size. This has a far greater impact on visuals than 32-bit colour does. Currently the only game that comes to mind that requires 32-bit output is Delta Force 2.

The opengl driver, while being improved with each release still has some bugs in it (e.g. slowdown with blood platters in Quake 3 & opengl screen saver crashes). That said the Voodoo 3 ran fine for me in all I put it through. All my games ran fine on it, DVD’s played back fine as well.

3dfx’s next big thing, the VSA-100 will fix all these “issues”, providing 32-bit colour output & allowing 2048*2048 texture sizes.

16-bit V 32-bit

As you no-doubt have heard about by now. 3dfx’s stance on 32-bit colour is that the speed hit isn’t worth it at the moment. The Voodoo 3 has an optional new renderer to allow what amounts to 22-bit output. The performance hit of this is minimum & does remove a lot of the banding that can be seen in 16-bit output. As mentioned above VSA-100 will support 32-bit rendering & best of all 256*256+ texture sizes.

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