Voodoo 3

More on the Voodoo3

Voodoo3 In General: Voodoo3 cards are, despite their great frame rate performance, very limited cards. They cannot display 3D images in 32bit color, meaning that future games that support 32-bit color will look considerably worse on them, but most games only support 16-bit color for the time being. The Voodoo3 has a maximum texture size of 256x256 pixels, which basically translates into even worse image quality. You see, most upcoming games are now using textures that are 512x512pixels. This means that these textures are 4x bigger (256x256 = 65536, 512x512 = 262144), but they get squished down into a 256x256 format (ie, 4 pixels get bunched into 1) within the card, before being expanded again into 512x512 on the display. This process produces a very blurry image that is far more noticeable than the lack of 32bit color (at the moment, anyway.)

Another limitation that keeps the V3 from being a card that will carry you through games of the future is the 16MB memory limit. Although 16MB is a lot - about as much memory as PCs shipped with 3 or 4 years ago, it's isn't quite enough for future games after the next year or so. If the Voodoo3 runs out of memory locally, it will have to thrash - basically reading the new texture to be used all over again, while throwing away the old ones. Texture thrashing produces a hideous performance hit.

Of course, if the Voodoo3 had a proper AGP implementation, loading textures from system memory wouldn't be *that* bad. You can store textures that don't fit in a video card's local memory in system memory, and use AGP 2x to retrieve the textures at a nice 2x rate. Unfortunately, the V3 doesn't support AGP beyond taking advantage of the 66MHz bus.

More Drawbacks

The final reason why a Voodoo3 is not quite the perfect card is that its OpenGL drivers still need a little help. In the days of Quake and Quake II, the miniGL provided by 3dfx was king - easily the fastest available. Games such as Quake3 which used more commands and extensions than provided by the miniGL soon arrived, and suddenly, 3dfx had to provide a full OpenGL. 3dfx's first try produced a working driver, but image quality was substandard. Recent revision of the 3dfx OpenGL ICD has brought both image quality and speed ahead by leaps and bounds, but Quake3 on the Voodoo3 still doesn't look as good as on a TNT2 (due to 256x256 texture limitation and lack of 32bit color display ability).

The one area where the V3 holds a clear advantage over any TNT2 is when it comes to 3dfx's proprietary API, Glide. Glide works only on 3dfx boards, or Creative Labs video cards that have the Unified drivers installed. Glide runs very, very quickly on 3dfx boards, and developers praise Glide for its simplicity. Once you are done with working on Glide, it is easy to port to the other two major APIs, Direct3D and OpenGL.

Today, Glide support is beginning to wane. Developers now prefer Direct3D and OpenGL because they want to support the greatest number of 3D accelerators on the market. Doing Glide only 3D games was fine in the past because 3dfx made the only 3D accelerator back then, but now developers have to think about all those non-3dfx card owners out there.