Introduction

Time flies

Keeping up with the latest trends in the computer hardware industry can be a confusing task for many consumers. With hardware becoming outdated so quickly, your once state-of-the-art gaming rig is obsolete in a matter of months!

This especially rings true for the 3D graphics industry. Take for instance NVIDIA. Each fall the company introduces its new technology followed by their "spring refresh" offering an update to the graphics core later the next year.

In case you were wondering, this trend shows no signs of slowing anytime soon, with 3dfx set to introduce their upcoming Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5 line of video cards, as well as NVIDIA and their next product codenamed NV15. Not wanting to be left out of the race is ATI, with their next-generation Rage Fury 6 set to debut this summer.

Testing 1, 2, 3...

With this in mind we wanted to offer a comprehensive article on where all the video cards currently stand in terms of performance. This means performance comparisons and tests over multiple processors.

Due to time constraints Quake III: Arena is the sole benchmark used in this article. While we wanted to include more games that just Quake III, the game itself is easy to benchmark and very popular among our readers. After all, testing seven accelerators on four processors with multiple settings takes lots of time!

We'll be updating the article soon with the 64MB DDR GeForce and the Detonator 5.08 drivers that are becoming quite popular.

In this article, we've combined products from all the major players released over the course of the last year: 3dfx's Voodoo3, the ATI Rage Fury Maxx, Matrox G400 MAX, NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra and GeForce 256 SDR/DDR, and finally S3's Savage II graphics accelerator.

With AMD's Athlon continuing to gain market share, it was a no-brainer to include it with the "Coppermine" Pentium III and Intel's low-cost Celeron processors.