Voodoo3 3000

We've been working with a Voodoo3 3000 from STB (recently acquired by 3dfx, the maker of the Voodoo family of chips) and we're mightily impressed. This is a speedy graphics card in Direct3D modes, and one of the least troublesome, particularly with the Oct. 28, 1999 drivers). Look at these 3DMark 99 benchmark results:

3dfx Voodoo3: 4271
nVidia TNT2: 3976
ATI Rage Fury: 2917

Its performance is a full 25% above the results we obtained from the previous state-of-the-art system (also powered by 3dfx): a pair of Voodoo2 card's linked together in a "scan line interleaved" configuration. Best of all, the Voodoo3 driver worked in the majority of our tests (see notes, below) with nary a glitch -- a welcome contrast to our experiences with trouble-plagued Rage 128 drivers shipped by ATI in recent weeks (and months).

Installation was a snap. We inserted the card into our system's AGP slot (the Voodoo3 is an AGP 2x device) and powered up. Windows 98 detected the device, and prompted us for the drivers. We inserted the CD and a minute later it was working. We tested the card on an Abit BX6-based Pentium II system and a Pentium PC with an Asus P5A-B Socket 7 motherboard, using the ALi AGP chipset. Both worked the first try without incident. The company provides a helpful installation video on the driver CD and a quick installation booklet to help novice upgraders get started.

We'd agree with AnandTech's review, which states that "Out of the video cards compared, the best in 2D quality came from the 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 whose 350MHz integrated RAMDAC produced the clearest pictures at 1280 x 1024 and 1600 x 1200." (Anand rated only the Matrox G200 as superior in 2D output quality.)

The Voodoo3's image quality in 3D gaming is very good, but not great. This is because it does not support 32-bit "true-color" full-screen display modes. It uses some internal trickery to deliver an image the company says is equivalent to 22-bit color, which certainly isn't bad, but in a side-by-side comparison with one of the competitors listed above in 32-bit mode, you'll definitely notice the difference in some games. Textures that are photorealistic on, say, an nVidia card's output have a faint but noticeable dither pattern on the Voodoo3-powered display. It's not that big a deal to most people, but it's worth mentioning. With that said, it's important to note that the card does not have a problem displaying 24- or 32-bit true colour modes in 2D applications. We tested Adobe Photoshop in 16- 24- and 32-bit modes and the Voodoo3 looks as good as any other card you'll find with photographic images or gradient fills in 24- or 32-bit mode. Frankly, we think the hype over true-colour gaming is overrated, anyway -- there isn't a card on the market that doesn't suffer a noticeable slowdown in true-colour mode (after all, you're working with millions of colours instead of mere thousands) and, for most people, 16-bit colour provides the best tradeoff between image fidelity and performance.

3dfx ships drivers for Windows 95/98 and Windows NT 4. Both installed easily and worked well, although the NT driver's lack of support for DirectX (or should we say NT 4's lack of decent support for Direct X) makes it less suitable as a gaming solution. It is also notable that 3dfx's limited implementation of AGP (which doesn't really take advantage of the AGP bus for texture storage or retrieval at all), is believed to be a contributing factor to the fact that the 3dfx cards are considerably less trouble-prone than competing cards based on nVidia TNT, Matrox G200 or (especially!) Rage 128 chipsets. The Voodoo3 supports "hardware-assisted" DVD playback, but comes with a card you have to mail in to get the DVD software (they do this so they don't have to pay a royalty on every card shipped). Expect to pay about US $10 for the shipping/handling/CD fees. Apparently, the hardware assistance doesn't extend to support for motion compensation -- a dedicated hardware decoder card is still your best bet.

The only other drawback to the Voodoo3 is its lack of a shipping Open GL ICD driver. Don't be fooled by prerelease reports such as those at OpenGL.org that crowed "3Dfx will ship their first branded Voodoo boards with Voodoo 3 chips and include a full OpenGL ICD...All boards will ship with a full OpenGL 1.1 ICD..." or FastGraphics' breathless report that "Voodoo 3...will be cheap and ship with an OpenGL ICD...and thus support all OpenGL apps out of the box." It didn't happen, folks. The Voodoo3, as of driver version 1.01, uses Microsoft's software GL driver for programs that require Open GL. This makes a program such as Newtek LightWave 5.6 fully five times slower in performing shaded rendering on a Voodoo3 than on, say, an nVidia TNT-based card. However, a so-called MiniGL driver is provided for use with OpenGL based games. This miniport driver supports Intel (including Pentium III), Cyrix and AMD 3DNow! based CPUs. 3dfx reportedly plans to ship an Open GL ICD in June; thus, at the moment, nVidia's offerings are a better choice in this category. But for straight ahead gaming, the Voodoo3 rocks. As of May 1999, we think it's the best choice in gaming graphics cards, bar none.

Technical specs: The Voodoo3 3000, running a clock speed of 166 MHZ, comes with a 350 MHz RAMDAC and 16 MB of SDRAM (not SGRAM, as some early 3dfx promotional materials implied), providing a maximum resolution of 2046x1536. The Voodoo3 includes a TV/S-video output jack (RCA) in addition to a standard VGA connector.
Bundled Software: Full version of Unreal (including an upgrade to Unreal Tournament for only the cost of S&H); full version of Need for Speed III; special edition of Descent 3: Sol Ascent. A coupon for DVD player software is also provided.
Price: US$179
Warranty: Lifetime warranty in the U.S.; 10 years internationally.
Pros: Currently unsurpassed Glide and Direct3D performance, good software bundle.
Cons: Limited Open GL support. Driver version 1.01 had a few glitches. Update to the latest version for DirectX 7.0 support, power management fixes and other improvements.
Strongest competitors: cards based on the nVidia TNT2.

Sidebar:
Voodoo3 Tips
(supplied by Megan Prest)

Tip 1

• Before you do any frame rate testing make sure that vsync is disabled. You can do this by downloading PowerStrip from http://www.entechtaiwan.com/ps.htm or by putting this statement in your autoexec for opengl/glide. SET FX_GLIDE_SWAPINTERVAL=0
• For D3D you will need to edit the registry and enter a new string value under [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Class\Display\xxxx\D3D]  (xxxx will be 0000, 0001 or higher) SSTH3_SWAPINTERVAL  0
• When you test Quake 2, go to the video options and turn off 8bit textures. (This will get rid of the banding when you look at the sky.) Use the New MiniGL drivers that are on the CD.

Tip 2

• When grabbing screenshots, keep in mind 3dfx has a unique way of converting data in the frame buffer before we send it to the screen to be displayed.  As a result, we store "unfiltered" data in the frame buffer - and the filtering is performed at scan-out on the way to display.  This improves the quality of the picture displayed on the monitor, but doesn't actually change the data in the frame buffer.  Typically when you are doing a frame grab, you are just grabbing data directly from the frame buffer, which is "unfiltered" so the quality of raw images grabbed from the frame buffer is actually lower than what is actually displayed.  HyperSnap, a frame grabbing utility, actually implements our filtering technique on their frame grabs, producing a more accurate representation of what the user would see on their display by actually running our filter on the data and writing out the filtered, instead of the "raw" data.  Get HyperSnap at http://www.hyperionics.com/
• For a higher quality image, make sure you have "Use high quality but lower performance video" checked in the D3D/Direct Draw section of the "3dfx tweaks" page in "3dfx tools" (see page 5 of Appendix 3 for details).  It's basically a 2x2 box filter, which means we filter images to produce a more pleasing image by sampling and filtering 2x2 blocks on scan-out.  The reason this runs slightly slower than standard filtering is that it consumes some additional frame buffer bandwidth to perform this, which in frame buffer bandwidth limited applications can have a slight (a few %) performance impact.

Tip 3

• The "Use higher quality but lower performance video" button in the 3dfx Tools utilities does not correctly enable this setting.  I have attached an application-based solution to this email that has been approved by 3dfx QA and will allow users to turn the high quality video on and off.
• To use this application, simply drag it do your desktop (or any other area) and click on it.  A small dialog box will appear with the comment "Enable higher quality video?" with a yes and no button.  Make your choice and your done.

Tip 4

• Hyperionics has released a new version that includes Voodoo3 support:

HYPERSNAP 3DFX HOW-TO

First, we need to setup and configure Hypersnap. As of 4/20/99, Two files are needed. The 3.30 version of Hypersnap and the dxsnap.dll file. Once 3.40 is released, you will only need the 3.40 version of Hypersnap (no dxsnap.dll file to copy).

1. Download and install the 3.30 version of Hypersnap from www.hyperionics.com
2. Download the DXsnap.zip, and uncompress this file into the Hypersnap directory. (Usually c:\hysnapdx\) This file can also be found on www.hyperionics.com

The Dxsnap.dll has the correct 2x2 filtering code for Voodoo 3. The 3.30 version of Hypersnap has a pretty good version of the 2x2 filtering, but it's not 100% correct. The next release of Hypersnap (3.40) will have the correct filtering built in, and will not require this extra copy step.

Next we need to configure Hypersnap to filter our images after taking the snapshot. We do this with the following three steps

• On the capture menu, select "Enable Special Capture (DirectX, Glide, DVD..". An option screen should appear.
• On the option screen, check the box called "Enable post-processing of pictures snapped from Directx or Glide."
• On the same option screen, Select the type of 3D graphics controller you have. For voodoo 3, use the option "3Dfx Voodoo 2, Banshee or other Voodoo 2 based card".

You are now ready to take Voodoo 3 filtered snapshots using Hypersnap!

Voodoo3 Compatibility Notes

Although the Voodoo3 was a relatively trouble-free performer in our tests, there are some known issues in the 1.0x drivers to be aware of. Some PCs won't come back from sleep mode with the 1.0 drivers installed. Some users report that the colour palette is inverted when switching resolutions "on the fly" in Windows 98; others report video corruption (blocks and lines) when running Win98 or NT4. This latter problem can, 3dfx says, be solved by turning "Block Write" off. AVI playback in the Windows Media Player is not accelerated; 3dfx recommends upgrading to the latest version of MS Media Player to fix this issue.

Because the software does not currently provide a full OpenGL ICD, 3DS Max may crash when its OpenGL option is selected. (This didn't happen in our tests of MAX 2.5; however, the OpenGL display did not initialize correctly.) Some programs, including Tiger Woods 99, Mortal Kombat 4, Fifa 99 and the retail version of Need for Speed III will not run in Voodoo3 Glide mode without a fix, but will run if configured for Direct3D. Others, such as Madden99, will only run at 640x480 in Glide. A few other games, including Carmageddon2 and TNN Pro Hunter don't currently run at all. Carnivores needs a patch to support the Voodoo3's Glide.

A few other games display anomalies: Interstate '76 draws incorrect textures; Myth: The Fallen Lords has sprite corruption when alt-tabbing to or from the desktop; Urban Assault has a flickering overlay; Half-Life causes an application error when switching game resolutions and displays flashing decals at times; Rogue Squadron displays corrupted text; the retail version of Unreal, too, displays flashing textures. (The bundled versions of Need for Speed 3 and Unreal work fine.) Switching from windowed to full-screen modes in Quake II will kick you out of the game to the desktop. The most serious display anomaly we noted was in Hash's Animation Master 98 -- it ran, but the shaded rendering was so messed up, the program was essentially unusable.