3rd Generation Cards

Old Faithful

We'll cover the older, more established cards first. With the release of the new generation of video cards, these once cutting-edge cards have now become very affordable.

From 3dfx we have the Voodoo 3, from NVIDIA the TNT2 Ultra, and from Matrox the G400 MAX. Keep in mind that all three of these cards have multiple products based on the same core. For instance, 3dfx has multiple Voodoo3 accelerators in both AGP and PCI formats. For the purposes of this article, we decided to stick with the most popular configurations.

3dfx Voodoo 3

3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 graphics controller
AGP form factor (2X, no AGP texturing)
166MHz Graphics Core
166MHz Memory
16MB SDRAM
333Mtexels/s fill rate
2D resolution to 2046x1536
350MHz RAMDAC
16-bit color
16-bit Z buffer
Point-sampled, bilinear, trilinear filtering
Perspective correction
Supports Glide, D3D, OpenGL
Emboss Mapping
256x256 maximum texture size limit

Voodoo3 3000

NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra

NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra graphics controller
AGP 4x/2x/1x, with sideband and AGP texturing support
150MHz Graphics Core
183MHz Memory
32MB SDRAM
300Mtexel/s fill rate
2D resolution to1920x1440
300 MHz RAMDAC
16 and 32-bit color
Single pass multi-texturing
Point-sampled, bilinear, trilinear, and 8-tap anisotropic filtering
Perspective correction
24-bit Z-buffer
8-bit stencil buffer
2048x2048 (2K x 2K) texture size limit
Emboss bump mapping, light maps, reflection and environmental maps
30fps full screen DVD playback
DVD sub-picture alpha-blended compositing

Creative Labs TNT2 Ultra

Matrox G400 MAX

Matrox G400 MAX Graphics controller
256-bit DualBus architecture
True 128-bit external bus to video memory
32MB SDRAM
AGP 4X/2X with AGP texturing and sidebanding
True Environment Mapped Bump Mapping
Vibrant Color Quality2 (VCQ2) Technology
333Mtexels/s fill rate
166MHz core clock
360MHz RAMDAC with UltraSharp RAMDAC technology
Single cycle multi-texturing

Matrox G400 MAX

Notes

3dfx chose all out performance when designing the Voodoo 3 at the cost of image quality.

On the other hand, Matrox engineers attempted to blend the best of both worlds with the G400 by adding new and innovative features such as Dualhead and environment mapped bump mapping.

Overall, many consider the TNT2 Ultra the best combination of performance, feature set, and price; a key reason why it's still selling so well today.