this is a good site for cheap components
They have the NVIDIA RIVA 128 board in stock.
necxdirect.necx.com
and a good article:
From the October 1997 Issue of PC World
Chips Make the
Difference
After looking at many different 3D boards, we have one piece of advice:
Don't believe all the hype about how wonderful these boards make your
3D games look. Some 3D images just don't look that good, and some
boards don't offer smooth game play. But when all is said and done,
there are definitely some 3D boards that deliver on their promise to blow
you away. To figure out which boards do what, you've got to start with
the 3D chips that are at their hearts. Here's a rundown of the
technologies that are competing for your 3D upgrade dollars.
3Dfx Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo Rush. 3Dfx is the king of 3D
chip sets: These chips were the fastest in our frame-rate tests and they
deliver the best 3D quality. Boards such as Diamond's Monster 3D and
Orchid's Righteous 3D (about $179 each) use the Voodoo Graphics chip
set, but they are not candidates for our Top 10 because they are 3D-only
boards. (You need a separate 2D board to run Windows.) The Voodoo
Rush, 3Dfx's next-generation chip set, gives you the same great quality,
and it can be combined with a 2D chip on a single board. The Hercules
Stingray 128/3D uses the Voodoo Rush, offering the best 3D of any
combination 2D/3D card we've seen. Its high price is its only drawback.
For a list of games written especially for the 3Dfx chip sets, go to
www.3dfx.com/voodoo/software/index.html.
ATI Rage II. The Rage II, a combination 2D/3D chip that is used in the
first-place Best Buy ATI 3D Pro Turbo PC2TV and the third-place ATI
3D Xpression+ PC2TV, delivers some good-looking 3D in Monster
Truck Madness and Terracide. The Rage II performs all the 3D
functions you're looking for, plus it can send its signals to a TV set so
you can play games on a big screen. For a list of games that are written
specifically for the Rage II, go to www.atitech.com/3dalley/titles.html.
Cirrus Logic Laguna 3D. Cirrus designed the Laguna 3D, a
combination 2D/3D chip, specifically to speed up Direct3D games. To a
large extent, the design works--which is important, since there aren't any
games are tailored for the Laguna 3D. The only Laguna 3D-based board
we tested was the Creative Labs Graphics Blaster 3D, which didn't make
the top 10. Although this board aced our frame-rate tests in both VRML
and 3D games, images didn't look as good as they did with boards that
use chips such as the Rendition Verite.
Matrox MGA-1164SG and MGA-2164W. Matrox has gambled with
its new 2D/3D chips by leaving out a few important 3D features in order
to achieve high frame rates, a key element of smooth game play. The
most important missing feature is filtering, which eliminates blockiness in
3D images. To compensate, the Mystique 220 supports a special kind of
texture mapping that fakes filtering and eliminates blockiness, but games
have to be written especially for the Mystique in order to see that
benefit. For a list of Mystique-specific games, go to
www.matrox.com/mga.
NEC PowerVR. Like the Voodoo Rush from 3Dfx, PowerVR is a
3D-only chip set that can be bolted to a 2D card to give you the
complete package. The VideoLogic Apocalypse 5D, which just missed
the chart, combines PowerVR with a fast Tseng Labs ET6100 2D chip.
(If you already have a good 2D card, you can buy the Apocalypse 3D, a
3D-only card.) In our tests, we found boards based on PowerVR to be a
little slower and of a little lower quality than 3Dfx-based boards. But
when you play a game written specifically for the PowerVR chip, such
as Kalisto's Ultimate Race, the results are stunning. For a list of games
written especially for the PowerVR, go to
www.powervr.com/html/software.htm.
Rendition Verite. Of the chips that have both 2D and 3D capabilities,
the Rendition Verite offers the best 3D quality. By the time you read
this, Rendition should have released its next-generation chip, which will
be called the V2200. In the meantime, the only board we tested with the
old Rendition chip, the Creativee Labs 3D Blaster PCI, has all the 3D
features you need: perspective correction, texture mapping, filtering,
alpha blending, and fogging. On the downside, when we tested this
Verite board with PC WorldBench, we found it to be significantly slower
than almost all other combination 2D/3D boards. Stay tuned for more
information on the Verite 2. For a list of games written especially for the
Verite, go to www.rendition.com/rready.html.
S3 Virge Family. The Virge was the first broadly available 2D/3D chip,
and lots of people got stuck with one in their new PCs. To its credit, the
Virge was good at running business programs, but it was terrible at 3D:
Games were slow and ugly. Newer versions of the Virge support
different types of graphics RAM: the Virge/VX uses VRAM or EDO
VRAM; the Virge/DX supports EDO DRAM; and the Virge/GX
generally supports synchronous RAM. While all the new versions crank
out 3D images faster, they don't look much better. And a bug in the
drivers causes problems with alpha bllending, which make some games
look terrible. Diamond was the only vendor to fix the problem in time for
this review, so make sure that whatever Virge-based board you decide
on has new drivers. |
