Introduction

We didn't buy it for the features

Speed is king, or so 3dfx thought. Hardcore gamers don't care about how games look. It's all about framerate, right? Gamers are willing to forgo 32-bit color and large textures just for speed. Yeah, that's what we thought too.

We were very surprised by the amount of reader backlash we received over our Q3test 1.05 Optimization Guide. Our guide basically advised readers to turn off all the pretty graphics to speed up the game. We thought it was a pretty harmless guide. We assumed most of our readers would have appreciated the article, because we thought most of our readers were hardcore Quake players just like us. Then the flames started coming.

It seems our guide offended several readers who couldn't fathom playing Q3 at anything lower than 1024 x 768 with all the eye-candy enabled. We didn't expect this response at all. People playing Q3 for the graphics? We were just playing for the competition. What's the point in playing if you're not trying to win?

Kenn has a habit of running around an empty map and examining the fine textures and level design, but throw him into a packed FFA and he's the first one to turn everything off. Pretty graphics are fine, but winning is more important to us.

Hardcore like Bubbles

Did 3dfx make the same mistake we did? Only a small percentage of gamers can be considered hardcore. Is the Voodoo 3 too hardcore for the average gamer? Well, if you're going to go for speed, you might as well go all the way.

The Voodoo3 2000, 3000, and 3500 clock/memory speeds are 143/143MHz, 166/166MHz, and 183/183MHz respectively. The TNT2 is available in 125/143MHz, 125/150MHz, and 150/183MHz speeds. Hercules made 145/170MHz and 175/200MHz versions, but the cards aren't available anymore because the company went out of business.

The Voodoo 3 cards don't seem to be much faster than the TNT2 cards, but let's see how far we can overclock them first. We just happened to have all three Voodoo3 cards in the office, so, naturally, we tried overclocking the hell out of them. Want to know how each of our cards fared? Read on to find out.