3dfx Voodoo Series For Voodoo3 Driver
Posted By admin On 31/01/22 3dfx has had the best-looking accelerator cards on the market since the Voodoo1 add-in card was introduced in 1997. This may be, in large part, due to well-worked color saturation, and texture smoothing. That not withstanding, the Voodoo3’s overall performance hasn’t been up to par when compared to its third generation competition. The Voodoo3 3500 TV AGP stacks quite well against the competition; even with the lack of extended AGP features typically expected in third generation video cards. Features lacking in the Voodoo3 include 4x AGP, texturing in system memory, 32-bit color support, side banding, hardware T&L, and a stencil buffer.
The Voodoo3 3500 is more than its Voodoo3 2000 or 3000 counterparts as it has a built-in TV and FM tuner along with MPEG-2 video capture and editing capabilities. Basically, a fat cable plugs into a proprietary interface on the back of the card. This cable then splits into two cables. The first is approximately 12 inches long and terminates in a female DB15 connector used for typical analog monitors. The other is 6 feet long, and over half-an-inch thick, terminating in a blue, flat-bottomed, pod shaped video I/O port. While ungainly in a cramped space, the I/O box is clearly marked and has audio connectors for stereo RCA and video connectors for composite and S-Video. It also comes with the Visual Reality package by Ligos, which while being feature packed, is a bit busy on the TV control side. It does, however, let you select skins for it much like Winamp. Also included is a copy of Ulead Video Studio – more on that later.
The Voodoo3 3500 TV AGP comes with a fat heat sink instead of a fan. Unfortunately, since the card seats upside down, the heat sink can’t take advantage of the airflow typically happening above the card around the processor. A heat sink/fan combo would have been better…
Upgrade Existing Voodoo3 Drivers-Start Windows 95/98. Download the kit listed below. Go to the directory where you put the Voodoo3 driver kit, run the executable kit file. At the welcome screen of 3dfx Tools, select NEXT. Click on YES when prompt to install Voodoo3 Driver. Much was made of Voodoo3 (as Avenger was christened) and its 16-bit only rendering. This was in fact quite complex, as Voodoo3 operated to full 32 bit precision (8 bits per channel, 16.7M colors) in its texture mappers and pixel pipeline as opposed to previous products from 3dfx and other vendors, which had only worked in 16 bit precision.
We threw the 3500 up against what we felt was typical competition in the marketplace – the Diamond Viper V770 Ultra (32Mb) and the ATI All in Wonder 128 (16Mb). Although we realize the Voodoo3, while pumping more power than it’s SLI Voodoo2 predecessor, is still limited to 16MB of RAM, like the ATI All-in-Wonder 128, will it hamper it’s assault on the current third-generation gamer’s choice which is currently the nVidia TNT2 Ultra?
Here’s a breakdown of features offered in the Voodoo3 series of 3dfx cards:
- Single Pass, Single Cycle Multi-Texturing
- Dual 32 Bit Texture Rendering Pipeline
- Alpha Blending
- Single Pass, Single Cycle Bump Mapping
- Single Pass, Single Cycle Trilinear MIP-Mapping
- Gouraud Shading
- Programmable Fog Tables
- Sub Pixel, and Sub Texel Correction
- 128 Bit 2D acceleration
- 8 Million Polygons per second peak processing
- MPEG-1, 2 Playback
DVD playback is provided by the full version of InterVideo WinDVD. This software-only DVD solution offers playback that very nearly rivals our sweetheart, the RealMagic Hollywood Plus hardware DVD decoder!
Here are the specs of the test system used in the review:
- Intel Pentium III 600E Coppermine (100MHz)
- 128MB 133MHz SDRAM (6ns)
3dfx Voodoo
- ASUS P3C2000 (Intel 820-based) motherboard
- USWC for AGP selected in bios
To see the full MadOnion 3Dmark2000 results, click here…
3dfx Voodoo Series For Voodoo3 Drivers
We find this new MadOnion benchmark very handy for testing the desktop video subsystem. I is designed to benchmark the video stream pipeline used in DVD playback, video editing, and many other applications that would overlay a video image over your desktop. The “VideoMarks” are a total of all three of Video2000’s tests. Quality measures the overall image quality generation of the Video card, Performance is video playback, and processing speed (and is affected by system/CPU speed), and Features are a measurement of how many Desktop features your card supports (overlay scaling, upscale/downscale, and the like).
The desktop/DVD performance narrows the margin quite a bit between these cards. Where the 3500 rocks on the Qualitymarks and 2D performance, the ATI spanks on the features. Two things of note; the Video2000 DVD tests wouldn’t run on the ATI because it didn’t recognize ATI’s software Cinemaster, and during the Overlay test, we nearly had to abort the benchmark due to video corruption (buttons not refreshing, mouse disappearing).
Gaming is clearly No Contest. Above resolutions of 640×480, Q3A becomes unplayable with the All-in-Wonder 128. At 1024×768, the 3500 ran smooth with only the rare occasional jerk when Q3 hit the hard drive to access data. Only having the option for 16 bit color sucks. The visual quality of this game is Much better at 32 bit. It is playable, and textured very nicely, but in things like fog, and smoke, there is a definite graininess. The ATI didn’t fare well at all over 640×480, but in 32 bit color looked better than the 3dfx.
The Unreal Tournament Wicked400 demo is more designed for overall system speed rather than just the video subsystem. There usually aren’t great variants in performance, but it does hammer the video real good. The 3dfx, and ATI are nearly neck-and-neck until 1024×768, however that was with 3dfx using the setting for 3dfx/Glide, and ATI using OGL. When set to OpenGL (which according to 3dfx this card supports) the 3500’s performance was reduced by a third.
Specifications:
- Controller: 3dfx Voodoo3
- Bus Type: AGP 1x and 2x
- Memory: SDRAM (16MB)
- Core Clock: 183 MHz
- RAMDAC: 350 MHz
- Vertical Refresh: 60Hz-160Hz
- Maximum Resolution: 2046×1536
- API Support: DirectX, Glide and OpenGL (Yes, OpenGL)
- Connectors: TV and FM coax inputs, an I/O pod connector and VGA
| The Good: | The Bad: |
| – Excellent visual image rendering – Beautiful, near hardware, DVD playback quality – CABLE READY TV tuner (And all that that implies) | – Unruly I/O Cable – Lack of a Number of AGP Features – Limited to 16 MB Memory – No DB15 Connector on the card (You have to use the I/O cable) |
| Company: | 3dfx |
| Price: | $200 (retail box) |
| Company URL: | www.3dfx.com |
| Product URL: | www.3dfx.com/prod/voodoo/v3-3500-overview.html |