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of Voodoo 3.
By Anubis
Review of Voodoo 3 2000 PCI card
As you may already know, my iMac, the computer I used to play
first person shooters, exploded. Investigations are still going
on as to whether this explosion was caused by a terrorist attack,
but in the meantime my ability to engage in fire combat with
pixilated computer representations of the people that beat me
up in high school had been impaired. So, throwing caution into
the wind, I bought a Voodoo 3 off of ebay. I chose a Voodoo card
because the fact that the company went out of business, combined
with the fact that their cards don't work under OS X means people
are unloading them like they are infected with the plague. I
did not care that the company was out of business and I would
rather be poked in the eye with a sharp stick than use OS X,
so these failings were not an issue for me.
INSTALLATION
Installation of the card was fairly quick. Since previous experience
with Apple hardware has shown me that their stuff has about as
much tolerance for heat as a carton of milk from my high schools
cafeteria, I chose to install a large 80mm fan in the PCI slot
directly below the 3d cards heatsink. I really needed some sort
of futuristic ice beam, or barring that, air conditioning, but
the fan would have to do. I had heard reports that the power
supplies in the model of computer I had were very weak, so to
prevent a power supply failure, I disconnected the internal zip
drive. The card was recognized without the addition of drivers,and
displayed 2D video on startup, a pretty strong indication that
it was an actual Mac video card, with Mac specific chips, and
not just a modified PC card. Unfortunately to do 3D acceleration,
the card needed drivers. I was running System 8.1, a system I
had run for months before without a crash, but the drivers required
System 9, a system that crashes me four times an hour in Photoshop
and is incompatible with dozens of my programs. To get around
this i configured the system as a duel boot system, so I could
use 9 when I needed the 3D card and 8.1 when I actually needed
to get some work done.
UNREAL TOURNAMENT
The comparison systems were an iMac with a Rage 128 with 8 megabytes
of VRAM, an iMac with a Rage Pro with 4 megabytes of VRAM, and
and software rendering on a 266 Mhz G3 tower. The test map was
DM-CoBor, a map that would bring my old system to its knees.
In the main reactor room (where polycounts would spike to over
1000) the Rage Pro would choke at 9 fps, with the resolution
set to 640x480 doubled and all the eyecandy except fast translucency,
shiny surfaces,and coronas turned off. The Rage Pro also displayed
a number of rendering artifacts, for example polygons in weapon
models would frequently cut through other polys in the model.
The card also rendered the map extremely dark, even with the
gamma turned all the way up. The Rage 128 did considerably better,
it rendered at about 16 fps at 640x480 with all the eyecandy
turned on. Unfortunately the card not only displayed all the
rendering errors of the previous card, it also displayed severe
tearing on the support columns of the control rods and in other
areas where the polycounts jumped significantly. The map would
not load under software rendering. The Voodoo 3 ran at about
20 fps in the reactor room at 800X600 with all the eyecandy turned
on and displayed none of the rendering errors of the Rage cards.
Unfortunately the Voodoo had its own rendering errors, on textures
with no mipmaping (the textures in the brinkman building map
for example) the Voodoo card would add shadows and distorsion
from nonexistent lights, making the textures look much worse
than they did on the Rage cards. Normal framerates for the Voodoo
card hovered around 40 fps
QUAKE 3
Even though Quake 3 is not my game of choice, I still have it
and play it on occasion. Quake 3 took much more of a hit on my
old system than Unreal Tournament, the framerates hovered around
10fps with the default configuration settings. This made the
game nearly impossible to play, it was difficult to use any weapon
that required you to aim, and most of the time the other players
looked more like swarms of bees wearing color coordinated shirts
than space marines or whatever. The new card made a major improvement
in Quake 3 gameplay. In addition to 3D fog, real transparency,
environment mapping and all the other Quake 3 eyecandy the card
supported, I could actually move smooth enough to aim the railgun,
and the other players did not look like they were made out of
Lego blocks. Quake 3 still can not compete with Unreal Tournament,
but at least now it can put up more of a fight.
CONCLUSION
The Voodoo 3 made a large improvement in the quality of my Unreal
Tournament gaming sessions and had the added bonus of improving
Quake 3 as well. Sure there are Geforce 3's and Radeon 8500's
out now but those cards would require me to have a computer that
was not hot shit back when Clinton was in the White House. The
Voodoo 3 is a welcome addition to my computing arsenal
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