When compared to its predecessor the Voodoo2
stomps on it being some three times faster in terms of
polygon counts and then approximately twice the fill
rate. For any of you that want me to fanny about a bit I
will. The Voodoo2's expandable architecture tops out at
a bandwidth of some 2.2 gigabytes per second whilst
pulsating some 50 billion operations per second. And
according to 3Df'x's own press releases the Voodoo2
can also wallop out some 90million dual-textured,
bilinear filtered, per-pixel MIP-mapped, alpha blended
Z--buffered pixels per second. The figure of some 3
million triangles per second is testimony that '3Dfx likes
it hot'.
The advent of 'entry' level Pentium II 300MHz PC's
becoming more common than occurrences of aliens
giving annul probe's to residents of Utah, has allowed
the games and 3D graphics industry alike to have more
'oomph' at their disposal. Enter Quake2. Enter the
Voodoo2. Get the picture? Alas, don't worry, I have
(rather Diamond has) the remedy, this is it baby- the
much hyped and long awaited Voodoo2, full-on and in
the flesh in the form of the Diamond's Monster 3D II. At
least that's the hype out of the way but just how much
beef does it pack then?
Don't worry, I'm not going to trawl on about how the
flipping box looks. I mean it's a box OK? You know like,
rectangular in shape and depth? Not particularly big but
it does have a slight calypso feel to it if you must. Still
with regard to the card itself, those of you that have
seen pictures of an 8MB 3Dfx Voodoo2 reference design
might well have been looking at a Diamond Monster 3D
II. They are both one and the same thing and very much
the same animal- only with different markings. The 3Dfx
board had '3Dfx Interactive' on it and the Diamond board
has 'Diamond Multimedia' inscribed on the circuit board
instead. Clearly Diamond has shied away from messing
or tweaking with the reference design whatsoever. There
has been no shuffling around or indeed any addition of a
TV-Out either. Their priority was to get the board out as
fast as they could and even though Creative beat them
to it by a hair and a whisker, they did basically do that
job.
Diamond's use of 3Dfx's Voodoo2 chipset for the
Monster 3D II harbours what is known as a 4/2/2
configuration. In plain English this means that the board
itself has one Pixelfx2 chip using 4MB of frame buffer
memory and two Texelfx2 chips each using 2MB of
texture memory. And without getting all anal about it-
that equates to some 8MB and sixteen memory chips.
The slap bang effect of a 4MB of frame buffer memory
unit means that the old Voodoo Graphics ceiling of a
640x480 resolution can be swiped away. The Voodoo2
is able to go higher as well as just faster. Playing
games at 800x600 or even 1024x768 (with two
Voodoo2's in SLI mode) resolutions is truly a breath of
fresh air.
