3dfx Voodoo3

Matrox took the worst beating of all time when they failed to release their OpenGL ICD on time for the G200. It seemed like everyone, including AnandTech, was ragging on Matrox for releasing a killer product, but not bothering to spend the development time on a strong OpenGL ICD for the gamer in all of us. On the other hand, 3dfx has been living without an OpenGL ICD for quite some time now, and the worst they've received is a slap on the wrist. If 3dfx doesn't have an OpenGL ICD, then how does your Voodoo2 work in the latest games that aren't Direct3D accelerated? Simple, 3dfx can refrain from using OpenGL in a majority of the most popular games, due to the fact that their own custom API (like OpenGL or Direct3D) known as Glide, is incredibly popular already and most games do happen to support it, sometimes you'll find games that only support Glide in favor of OpenGL or Microsoft's Direct3D!

So what happens if a game you're trying to play doesn't have Glide support? Well, you can hope that it supports Direct3D acceleration, which the Voodoo3, as did the Voodoo2, Banshee, and Voodoo, supports. If it doesn't support Direct3D, then you're completely out of luck until 3dfx can release an OpenGL ICD. Because of the lack of an OpenGL ICD, 3dfx had to toss together a MiniGL driver for a number of the most popular games based on engines similar to one another so they wouldn't be placed in the same position Matrox was. This MiniGL driver provides for the quality and performance of the Voodoo3 to be taken advantage of, however the compatibility with the latest games is not at a level where you can expect support for every game to be provided for. Games such as Half-Life and Quake 2 (and all games based on the Quake 2 engine) are supported by the MiniGL driver, as will a large portion of future games, however one of the most underrated weaknesses of 3dfx is definitely the lack of an OpenGL ICD.

Because of the nature of this MiniGL driver, users of AMD K6-2/3 processor with 3DNow! enabled will have to perform a tiny hack to get the most performance out of their systems in games based on the Quake 2 engine that have 3DNow! accelerated 3dfxGL patches. The procedure is as follows:

1. Rename the MiniGL driver provided with the Voodoo3, 3dfxgl.dll, to opengl32.dll in your game's base directory.
2. Apply the 3DNow! patch from AMD
3. Select 3DNow! Default OpenGL as the default rendering device in your video options.

The performance of the Voodoo3 on a K6-2/3 system is by far the greatest among all video accelerators, however AnandTech has refrained from the inclusion of a Super7 performance comparison in this review due to length constraints and will provide for one solely centered around Super7 systems at a later date.

AnandTech received a final revision Voodoo3 2000 AGP and a pre-release Voodoo3 3000 AGP for benchmarking purposes. AnandTech's Slot-1/Socket-370 test configuration was as follows:

• Intel Pentium III 500, Intel Pentium II 400, Intel Pentium II 266, Intel Celeron 333, Intel Celeron 266 (0KB L2) on an ABIT BX6 Revision 2.0 or an ABIT ZM6 for the Socket-370 Celeron 333 tests.
• 64MB of Memman/Mushkin SEC Original SDRAM was used in each test system
• Western Digital 5.1GB Ultra ATA/33 HDD
• Microsoft Windows 98
• Diamond Monster Fusion 16MB SGRAM Banshee, Matrox Mystique G200, ATI Rage 128 (16MB), nVidia Riva TNT (16MB), and Diamond Monster 3D-2 (12MB) were used for comparison tests

The benchmark software used was as follows:

• id Software's Quake 2 Version 3.20 using demo1.dm2 and 3Finger's crusher.dm2
• Monolith's Shogo 2.2 using 3Finger's RevDemo
• Acclaim's Turok2 using T2MARK
• Ziff Davis' Winbench 99 at 1600 x 1200 x 32-bit color for 2D performance tests

Each benchmark was run a total of three times and the average frame rate taken. V-Sync was disabled.