|
I'm not sure how far on Diamond's drivers are at this stage but they did in fact state that their board was set to the 'default' clock (being 100MHz) and that with further driver tweaking they would take up the clock speed to 125Mhz. They did say that they would do this in the usual way of providing a slider in the display adapter control panel. However 3Dfx's own reference board was also running at the 'default' clock speed so go figure. I really wouldn't read too much into this, because Diamond still has a bit of time yet to fix up their drivers to get the maximum possible performance out of their Monster Fusion. Still the latest drivers from 3Dfx that I used were significantly faster (Glide2x driver 2.6 and Glide3x 3.1 D3D 2.18) as the graphs display. One strange thing I noticed was that with the reference board most games weren't working right at 1024x768. For example, Incoming was running but minus any textures! In other words only the gouraud shading was visible. Still, Diamond's board did indeed work just fine at this resolution so I'll take it as being a slight bug with 3Dfx's latest drivers. Other than that, there are no complaints on the driver side from 3Dfx as you'd expect.
Why am I getting my nickers in a twist over this? I don't know... but it's funny when OEMs slap each other senseless by claiming that their boards are better than their competitors ones because they've not just gone and manufactured a reference design. Still if 3Dfx have indeed got a super fab. reference design, then why on Earth bother messing with it? These are the dilemas facing the likes of 3Dfx's smaller OEM partners. They've got to try and add on the on-board coffee makers and toasters just to eke out an extra frame per second to look that bit more attractive over the likes of Diamond and Creative. However, OEMs can fiddle all they like with the first line of the Voodoo Banshee family and they won't be able to match the Voodoo2. But if you can handle playing Quake2 at 1024x768 at just below 30 frames per second at a lower cost than playing Quake2 at 800x600 at a higher frame rate then the Voodoo Banshee may well turn out to be the card for you. Extreme this card ain't in terms of performance. If you want 'extreme' then spit-polish those Voodoo2s in SLI. That's the best that money can buy if you want the fastest Quake2 performance on the block. It is however going to come in many flavors and be cheaper than the Voodoo2. With it superb 2D performance (yes I do like 1600x1200 in 32 bit color thank you very much) rolled into the fact that you get Glide and great D3D performance, the whole package does indeed look quite attractive- albeit it to the less frenetic Quaker.
I'm sure that 3Dfx's next Voodoo Banshee will be able to challenge the might of their Voodoo2, if as I indeed speculated that their should be two on-board TMUs and a lot more memory (32MB?). But at the end of the day, religious 3Dfx supporters will most likely chuck out their 2D cards and stick in a Banshee to go with their Voodoo2s right? Well I will for the time being...
Related Articles
|
 |