The Voodoo 3 2000 AGP on the VA-503+



It was around this time last year that 3dfx announced its Voodoo 3 line of graphics boards. As I recall, the product announcement was not well received in the gaming community. People criticized the card for its lack of support for 32-bit rendering, its 256x256 texture limit, its lack of support for AGP DiME (texturing from main memory), and so on and so forth. Everyone pretty much recognized that the Voodoo 3 was nothing more than an overclocked banshee with a second TMU. Still, the Voodoo 3 was not without its virtues.

The least expensive version of the card (the Voodoo 3 2000) was quite affordable. Everyone agreed that whatever its othr shortcomings, the card was fast. The quality of 3d rendering was, if not up to the standards of competing Nvidia cards, at least acceptable. However, the most important single feature of the Voodoo 3, at least to those of us with Super Socket 7 motherboards and AMD 3dnow chips, is that it worked. Of course, Tnt2 and Matrox cards also work on Super 7 systems. But it is clear that making a TNT2 work properly on, for instance, a VA-503+ is more difficult than making a Voodoo 3 card work on a VA-503+ by at least least one order of magnitude .

So here it is a year after the Voodoo 3 product announcement. Once again, a new line of 3dfx cards has been introduced to a rather, um, mixed response from the gaming community. Does the old Voodoo 3 2000 still have anything to offer the VA-503+ owner? That is what we intend to find out.



INSTALLATION


Let's start with the Voodoo 3 2000's most important "feature" - the relative ease with which this card can be made to work on a VA-503+. Although it is true that the V3 2000 is easier to setup than a true AGP 2X card, it is not impossible to muck matters up :)

Allow me to illustrate . . . For reasons I won't go into, I was a little careless in my initial installation of the v3. Basically, I uninstalled the old banshee drivers, removed the old card, jammed in the v3 and rebooted. I used the 1.0 drivers (we're now up to 1.04.00) off the included installation disk rather than grabbing the latest set from 3dfx. I will not go into the outcome of this attempted installation except to say that things went south pretty quickly. I assume that either the early drivers or some remnant of my banshee drivers were to blame. In any case, I managed to tank my system completely (could only boot in safe mode). I decided that an, ahem, "quick" reinstall of windows would be just the thing. I reinstalled Windows and ... funny, I keep forgetting about that darned AMD patch (for W95 OSR2). In the end I had to open my machine again, clock the machine down to 300, install the AMD patch, and clock it back up to 450. At this point, I downloaded the new V3 drivers and got things on track.

There is a moral to this story. Although the V3 is not nearly as finnicky about bios settings and AGP patches and whatnot as are the TNT2, Matrox, or S3 AGP cards, you will need to use common sense in the installation process (newest drivers, etc.).


As far as patches and bios tweaks are concerned, since the V3 does not use AGP texturing, I can think of no reason whatever to install the AGP GART drivers. Likewise, AGP aperture settings in the bios should be irrelevant (I've set mine at 16MB but I don't think it makes any difference). You will want to set the AGP mode to X2 since we want the bus transfer to be as high as possible. Alas, I do not have any means to test the bus transfer, so this is just a suspicion.


Okay, so now we have the card up and running. How does it run? Well, it runs like a Banshee ... 2!


BENCHMARKS


Here is the system I benched it on:

VA-503+ 1.2A 1.15JE36
K6-2 450 AHX
V3 2000 AGP
DCS S805 (Vortex 1)
Artisoft Noderunner NIC (ISA)
Logicode 33H-P-CL modem


All benchmarks were run with highest quality sound and all effects enabled. Nothing was overclocked and no particular tweaks were employed.

Let's take a look at the Quake 3 Test 1.08 numbers first.




The Quake 3 test runs decently if unspectacularly on the V3 2000. Interestingly, there is almost no performance hit in moving from 640 x 480 to 800 x 600 at any quality level. Thus, the best mix of picture quality / speed would seem to rest at 800 x 600 with normal quality graphics, although I suppose that some people might want to run at the "fastest" setting for online gaming. But, let's be frank. Quake 3 isn't really the V3's cup of tea. 3dfx is still working on the V3's Opengl implementation. This was made clear in the latest driver releases in which the much anticipated 1.03 drivers were quickly (within one week) updated with the 1.03.04 drivers. This latter set of drivers gave me another 1 fps in Quake 3 at just about every resolution. Clearly, the Opengl ICD is not quite finished. Thus, let's move on to a game that the V3 likes a little better, Unreal.





If my system is any indication, Unreal seems to do very well on a VA-503+ / K6-2 450 / V3 setup. This is not terribly surprising. Unlike Quake 3, Unreal is still, in its heart, a Glide game. Moreover, it was one of the first games tweaked for the AMD 3dnow! instructions. 3dnow.net reports that the latest patch (2.25F) includes improved 3dnow! optimizations. As the benchmarks indicate, Unreal runs fine (38 fps) on this k6-2 450 at 1024 x 768 with everything maxed out. And, I must say, Unreal looks pretty darned good at 1024 x 768. Jaggies are still present but to a much lesser degree than at 800 x 600. Since moving down from 1024 x 768 to 800 x 600 and 640 x 400 only gains you from 5 to 7 fps - there really isn't much point in running below 1024 x 768 with a V3. Sheesh, when I bought this game (a year ago) I was trying to get it running adequately at 512 x 384 on my old k6-2 300 / Diamond Stealth II S220 . . . I finally see this game's appeal.

No video card review, not even a cheesy little review this, would be complete without the obligatory Quake 2 benchmark. I don't know if anyone still plays this game but, by god, everyone still benchmarks it. So, here they are.




Obviously, the V3 2000 tears Quake 2 into little pieces. 40 fps in Crusher at 1024 x 768 is certainly not in P3 / Athlon territory, but, quite frankly, it's plenty fast. Although my little monitor does not go to 1280 by 1024, I'm sure that the V3 would run Quake 2 more than adequately at that speed.


Other Stuff


So much for the obligatory (thanks Tom) game benchmarks. How does the V3 do in more prosaic computer tasks? I didn't think it was worthwhile running 2d benchmarks on the V3. 2d on this card is very fast. The picture is very clear. Colors are rich. As the kids say, it's all good.


The V3 box claims that the card supports DVD in hardware but does not specify the kind or degree of support offered. The card comes with a mail in coupon for WinDVD but I can't really comment on whether or not WinDVD supports the V3's hardware DVD capabilities since I haven't received my copy. From what I hear, WinDVD is one of the slowest software DVD players around. Although the DVD players that I have tried do not appear to use any of the V3's alleged hardware support, movies play quite acceptably on my K6-2 450 system. If you can get your hands on a DVD player based on the Cinemaster engine (perhaps one left over from a previous video card), do so. On my system a Cinemaster based player played DVD movies with about 50 % cpu usage. Other players that I tried (PowerDVD) maxed the cpu out and still dropped frames.


Conclusion


So, is the V3 still a viable card? Yes, but with qualifications. A Voodoo 3 2000 AGP can be had for about $85 (including shipping) on pricewatch. Thus, the Voodoo 3 2000 is in about the same price range as the hamstrung 64 bit memory interface Nvidia cards (M64) - and costs somewhat less than the regular Tnt2 cards. If you are not a hardcore gamer (or you are a hardcore gamer on a limited budget) and want an inexpensive but effective 3d card to tide you over until the next generation of cards matures (and cheapens) then the Voodoo 3 2000 is an excellent choice.

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