3D Accelerator Card Reviews

3D Windows 95

The lead of NVidia's RIVA 128 chip in Direct3D is obvious, the first four cards are equiped with this chip. Diamond's drivers for the Viper V330 seem to be the best ones for this chip. ATI's Rage Pro chip is a worthy second, not very far behind the NVidia chip.

As soon as the textures get larger than the onboard texture memory, textures have to get transported from main memory. The Monster 3D reaches its limits already at a resolution of 640x480 and is suffering from the slower PCI bus, thus it has the worst result here. The new 3D king NVidia's RIVA 128 chip wins this test as well, also Diamond's Viper V330 AGP is the fastest of all.

The Riva 128 is still performing best here as well, although it has only 4 MB local memory. This means that even at this resolution the Riva 128 will have to use main memory for textures, using AGP's DIME.

The Revolution 3D doesn't use AGP's DIME feature in its driver yet, which is the main reason why the performance is so bad in this test. Unfortunately is 1024x768 more than the Riva 128 can support under 3D, because 4 MB aren't enough for the front, back and z-buffer. This opens the field for ATI's Rage Pro chip, which clearly wins this test. Even the PCI version of ATI's Rage Pro is doing impressively well.

NVidia's RIVA 128 chip wins this benchmark as well, although I am wondering about the significance of this test. For some strange reason the Rendition Verite 2100 chip gets the undeserved last place.