3D Blaster Voodoo2 Riview
3D Blaster Voodoo2 Review
By: Jeremy Allford Date: March 16th, 1998
Type: 3Dfx Voodoo2
Developed by: Creative Labs
Comments: Voodoo2 has arrived!
Overall:90%
Performance: 100%
Value: 75%
Installation:100%
Drivers:85%
Only a small amount of time has passed since the Voodoo2 chipset was first announced. Since then almost every single video card manufacturer has jumped on the Voodoo2 bandwagon with Voodoo2 based cards of their own. Creative Labs was the first to market with their card, the 3D Blaster Voodoo2. Unfortunately for Creative they seem to be having a slight supply problem, which has been causing an uproar in the gaming community. I personally experienced the shortage problem first hand when I was trying to get a card for this review. The card left the assembly line on February the 20th and I picked up Tuesday March the 3rd from Best Buy. During the period of time between the shipping and when I picked up the card I had called numerous mail-order companies trying to get the card. A number of them said
that they would be getting the cards in the next day, but it turned out when the day came that they were mistaken. I also made calls to a number of area retailers who said they would be getting the cards in. Software Etc. told me every day for almost a week that they would be getting the cards in that next day. When they finally got the cards in, they received only 1 card which the store manager took home for himself. Finally on the 3rd I lucked out and Best Buy got a larger shipment of the cards in. After a short hour drive to the store
I was the proud owner of a Voodoo2 card.
Well since I now have my card I thought I could help you with your future choice of which card to get. One thing that will make it harder to figure out which card to purchase is that they will all basically perform the same. There will be 5 basic things to look for when you choose the card for your needs.
1.Who has the product? - Right now only Creative, but soon Diamond,
Calgraph, STB, Gulliemont, Orchid and more.
2.What is the price? - Since the cards will be virtually identical, the cheapest should be the winner.
3.What is the Bundle? - Creative is a definite loser in this category.
4.What are the features? - What do you need in the card. 12 meg. TV
out. Tweaked drivers.. etc..
5.What is the brand name? - Face it, if I make a card called the Jeremy Voodoo2, it will not sell. You have to have a name to get out your product in quantity.
To fairly rate the Creative 3D Blaster you have to put it through the 5 points I mentioned above and analyze the results. Creative was first to market with their card, which is a definite plus for them. Not only were they first to market, but they brought a 12MB card to the party. Diamond, STB, Calgraph and more will all be bringing 12MB card themselves soon, but Creative has them now.
The next point is the price of the card. The first 12MB card that was announced was the California Graphics card, which was to have a selling price of $399. Now that the market has settled down, the average price for the upcoming 12MB cards is a low $299.You can even pick up the card for as low as $260 from some mail order companies. Not to bad for a card which provides your computer with the power of a SGI workstation.
Another point to look for is what the bundle of the card is. Creative definitely loses out on this point, providing no bundle other then the driver disk. This is a big mistake in my mind, I would have like to see more then anything a good Voodoo2 supporting game bundled along with the card. Creative says the reason for no bundle is the fact that most prospective Voodoo2 buyers already have a bunch of games for the original voodoo. Come on Creative, we have a bunch of games that already run at their top speeds on our Voodoo 1 cards. Other then Quake 2 and a few other games out there with higher resoultion support, nothing takes advantage of the card.
The next point you want to look for is the cards features. The Creative Labs entry is packed with 12 meg of ram which is a plus. On the down side they are using 3DFX's reference drivers and their card does not support TV out. Diamond on the other hand provides you with their own drivers, which give you a few more tweaking options. Diamond shows off the advantage of developing their own drivers with the inclusion of a slider for setting the cards speed.
The final point to remember is the brand name of the card that you are going to buy. You may not think brand name matter but try saying that again when you buy a card with a tech support crew of one old lady and an answering machine. I made a call to Creative's Tech support and was connected through in less then a minute.
Now that I actually have the card and been playing with it for almost a week, the novelty has worn off and I can give you a fact filled review with no brainwashed thoughts. Brainwashing is the thing that happens when you first see the quake timedemo fly by at 89 frames per second. There is something about the illicit flashing of the screen that makes slush out of your brain, convincing you of the need for another card for SLI gameplay. But now that I have seen the good and the bad I can judge the card for the 3D-accelerating
piece of silicon it is.
Now that I finally have the card I figured it was time to stick it in my computer. The nice thing about 3DFX cards is the ease of installation. Basically all you have to do is stick the card into an empty PCI slot and hook up the cables. When the computer boots up it will detect the new card and have you insert the driver disk. Never before have I seen a card that is as easy to setup as the 3DFX line.
Creative seems to have forgotten to include an instruction manual with the card. All that I found inside the box was a piece of paper folded in 3 with basic instructions for setting up the card in your system. I know that Creative knows how to make an instruction manual because I have owned a few of their products, and they all had excellent documentation.
Creative also made a mistake in my eyes by not providing any games for us to play. It would have been nice if they could have worked out a deal to get a couple Voodoo2 supporting games or even a disk full of demos. Anything would have been better then a disk with only drivers on it. They justify it by saying it was to keep the cost of the card down, but other companies will be offering 12 mb cards with the same price with bundles. So I think it was more of keeping their profits up rather then the price down.
Now that I have the nitpicking out of the way it is time to talk about the games. I tried the card with plenty of games including Glide, Opengl and DirectX varieties. I played everything I could get my hands on and only received a few hiccups. The OpenGL based games all worked without a problem, running faster than I have ever seen. Glide games also ran fast as the devil but I had a few problems with some of the games. DirectX games ran without a problem, but they were nowhere as speedy as the other two APIs.
The current state of the Voodoo2 and Direct3D is not a very good one. The current revision of DirectX 5 does not support the Dual Texture processing units of the Voodoo2. Since it is not supporting them, the performance in Direct3d is not much better then it was with a regular voodoo. Wizmark is a good Direct3D benchmark and I only received a score of 45365, only 25% higher then the score I received with my Canopus Pure3d. I am told that we will see support in version 6.0, but that is still not supposed to arrive till some time in July. The one thing that I did notice about Direct3D performance is
that at the higher resolutions there seemed to be no slow down. Tombraider 2 at 1024x768 is a true site to behold. (Single Voodoo 2 cards support 1024x768 with Z-Buffering turned off.)
I have been playing with the card for over a week now and have
experienced a few strange problems, but nothing that I would call heat related. The biggest problem that I have is that after playing some games my desktop is discolored. Nothing to worry about though, just a driver problem. Even the problems that I had with some of the Glide games is not worth mentioning, because 3DFX is working around the clock to correct them. In fact by the time you read this review chance is that the newest drivers will be out and almost all woes will be over.
Both the 8 meg and 12meg cards support resolutions of up to 1024X768 with Z-buffering disabled. (In a 3D game, the only polygons that need to be drawn are the ones that the player would see. (Z-buffering is hardware that tells the computer which polygons it needs to draw, so it does not waste time on polygons the player will not see. - this translates into a better image for the player.) I was able to play Tombraider at 1024X768 with only one card and it was beautiful! I admit that there were plenty of artifacts from the Z-buffering being disabled, but once you have been playing the game for 30 minutes you will forget all the problems with the graphics. Plus to make things better, you always have the option of putting a second card in and enabling the Z-buffering, for the ultimate in speed and beauty.
Overclocking If you were a previous owner of a Voodoo card you are probably pretty familiar with overclocking. It is not quite as simple to overclock with the new Voodoo2 cards, but it can be done. You are going to have to mess with the registry, so make sure that you back it up before you play with it. Thanks go to Tom from Tom's hardware for the following invaluable overclocking instructions.
1.Start up the registry editor, (regedit.exe) Choose "Edit","Find" and search for `SSTV2'
2.This will lead you directly to where you need to be.
`HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\3DFX
INTERACTIVE\VOODOO2\'
3.This key has 2 subkeys, 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\3Dfx
Interactive\Voodoo2\D3D' and
'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\3Dfx
Interactive\Voodoo2\Glide'. You will have to work with both if you
want to change the clock speed of the Voodoo2 for Direct3D as well as
Glide games.
4.Now right click on either one of these two keys, select 'New' and then 'String Value'. Call that new variable 'SSTV2_GRXCLK'.
5.Double click on the new variable you just added and enter the clock
speed you want the Voodoo2 to run at in decimals.
6.Default is '90' for 90 MHz, so you obviously want to get higher. Please be aware of the risk of overheating and maybe even destroying your Voodoo2 board, I won't take any liability. I don't think that overclockingthe Voodoo2 is necessary and it doesn't give you that much of a performance increase as well.
Remember that the newest Diamond drivers support
overclocking in the control panel, and I am sure it will not be very long before we see the option in the 3DFX reference drivers also.
Benchmarks
Pentium II 300 system
Abit LX6 motherboard
64 MB SDRAM
Maxtor Diamondmax 7.4 GIG UDMA 2
Windows 95 OSR 2.1
The setting of Creative's 3D Blaster clock frequency was 90. The
Canopus Pure3d was running the latest Canopus drivers,)
640X480
800X600
1024X768
Forsaken
300MHZ P2 - Single Card
104.4
90
300MHZ P2 - SLI
126
124
100
300MHZ P2 - Canopus Pure3d
55.4
200MHZ mmx - Single Card
62.3
61.9
200MHZ mmx - SLI
63
62.8
61.9
Quake 2 - Demo2
300MHZ P2 - Single Card
41.2
43.2
300MHZ P2 - SLI
69.1
58.2
63
300MHZ P2 - Canopus Pure3d
23.3
200MHZ mmx - Single Card
25.9
25.9
200MHZ mmx - SLI
25.9
25.8
25.8
GLQuake - Demo 2
300MHZ P2 - Single Card
84.6
82.2
300MHZ P2 - SLI
136.2
112
73.1
300MHZ P2 - Canopus Pure3d
29.2
200MHZ mmx - Single Card
83.1
63.7
200MHZ mmx - SLI
93.7
92.8
73.1
Conclusion There is no doubt in my mind that the Voodoo2 is
going to change the face of gaming, as we know it. A few other reviews
have raised the question on whether we actually need all the power the
Voodoo2 has to offer, and I think that yes we do. With 3 times the
speed of the previous generation of Voodoo cards for around the same
price that the voodoo1 card sold for only a year ago, Voodoo2 is the
definite choice for prospective 3D card buyers.
Now if you have a lower end pentium system I would not recommend
the upgrade, simply because the Voodoo2 is a strange beast which
craves the power of a fast processor. In fact a voodoo2 offers very
little improvement over the standard voodoo on computer below 200mhz.
Another thing to take into mind though is that when you do upgrade
your computer this will be the card to take along.
Now do I think you should buy the Creative Labs Voodoo2 Entry? Only
if you have to have a 12 meg card right now. The price is about the
same as the upcoming cards from other companies.. but it has no bundle
which is a big negative in my mind. As far as the 12 meg question goes,
the only advantage that a 12 meg card has over an 8 is larger texture
support. You still get the same resolutions of up to 1024x768 with no
Z-buffering.
Recommended:
CPU: Intel Pentium
RAM: 16MB
Hard Drive: 2MB
Reviewer:
CPU: Intel P2 300
RAM: 64MB
Hard Drive: 7.4 GB
Overall:
The Next
generation
of 3D
Cards is
here!
Happy
Happy Joy
Joy!
Value:
You can
buy a P2
for the
price of
this baby
Tech
Specs:
3Dfx
Voodoo2,
12MB of
EDO DRAM.
Pros:
All of your
games will
run faster
then the
speed of
the human
eye!
Cons:
The human
eye can
only see
30 fps
Your
Reviews
and
Comments.
op3dfx.com |
