I was given a PC last night with a 3dfx Voodoo3 3500 TV Agp card.
Has anyone had any experience with one of these? I know 3dfx has been out of business for several years, but this one might be a nice backup machine for miscallaneous stuff that won't work in XP/2000.
They are OK. Fine for 2D, but the 3D will be a little slow by modern standards. Think radeon 7500 performance.
I think there are still are people out there still updating drivers for the 3dfx series of cards to make them more compatible with Windows XP/2000. Found some links here:
http://www.voodoofiles.com/type.asp?cat_id=1
A Radeon 7500 is *much* faster then a Voodoo 3000/3500. Or at least it's much more powerful. In raw processing oomph they're probably more like a midrage Rage 128, or maybe the old Nvidia TNT 1. They often benchmark better then Rage 128s, but that's because:
A: 3D accelleration only works in 16 bit color modes. If the game supports 32 bit color the Rage 128 will do it.
B: Even though they have an AGP bus, they're not *really* an AGP card. They can't do texture memory transfers directly to main memory, so games are strictly limited to the RAM on the card. This speeds things up *if* the games graphics are crude enough to deal with that limitation, of course, but...
C: Texture size is likewise really limited. (I believe the limit is 256x256 pixels, and again, only 16 bit color.) So a given game might run faster on a Voodoo then it does on a Rage 128 or Nvidia TNT, but it'll look substantially worse if the game uses better textures on more capable cards.
Anyway. They were decent if not wonderful video cards by the standards of five years ago. Judge accordingly.
--Peace
I had a voodoo 2 and a rage 128 both in a B&W G3. In RAGE games the 128 was faster, in OpenGL the voodoo 2 was faster.
Given that the voodoo 3 3500 was about twice as fast as the voodoo 2, it should be roughly in the 7500 radeon range (keep in mind that the 7000 is actually slower than the original radeon and the 7500 is about the same).
I used to have a Voodoo3 3000, and I have a Radeon 7500 now. There's no comparison... the Radeon is stupidly, rediculously, unbelievably more powerful. (Look up some old reviews. The first-model Radeons used to lay the spank down on Voodoo 5 cards, and that's even allowing for the usual crappy early-rev ATI drivers.)
Seriously, we're not even in the same ballpark. A Voodoo3 *is* fast compared to its competition of similar vintage:
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/19990906/index.html
But that's it. I can't find a review showing a side-by-side between a Voodoo3 and a Radeon, but... here:
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20020418/index.html
There's one common chipset in both reviews, the Nvidia TNT2. It *roughly* tied with the Voodoo3 in the first review. (The Voodoo could kick it's rear in Glide-based games, but the TNT2 bettered in most other places. And could actually run games in 32 bit color.) In the second set of reviews, the TNT2 is always at the bottom, and... the original model Radeon never does any worse then just under twice as fast as it. (And averages somewhere around three times as fast.) Also note that the "current" Radeon 7500 is itself almost twice as fast as the original Radeon. Which makes it anywhere from four to six times as powerful as a Voodoo3. (Which roughly squares with my perceptions, having owned both.)
Anyway. You *might* be able to make a case for the Voodoo3 being almost as fast as the UberCrippled Radeon VE (aka 7000), but that's it. A real Radeon crushes it into a warm pasty goo.
--Peace