3D Accelerator Card Reviews

Canopus Pure3D

The 'Pure3D' from Canopus is in the first instance 'another' 3D add-on card with 3Dfx' Voodoo chip. If you take a sencond look though, you'll find that it's certainly outstanding against all the other Voodoo cards on the market. First of all it comes with 6 instead of the common 4 MB RAM. These 6 MB are divided into 2 MB for the frame buffer, also only enabling a maximal 3D resolution of 640x480, and 4 MB texture memory, double the amount of its competitors. The larger texture memory makes the card run a lot smoother with games that are using a lot of or large textures, because the textures don't have to be loaded from disk as often as if you've only got 2 MB texture memory.

The second speciality of the Pure3D is the TV/video out function. It enables you to play Quake at high quality and high speed on your television and the beauty of it is that it runs on your monitor simultaneously as well. The TV support form Canopus is indeed pretty unique, it has all feautures for adjusting your TV screen so that the picture looks best and you don't have to disconnect your monitor for it.

These two features combined with the most successful 3D accelerator chip are reason enough for choosing the Pure3D above all other 3Dfx Voodoo cards. Even the price is very attractive, since it's even cheaper than the Diamond Monster 3D. However Canopus does not bundle any games with it.

As you know, I'm currently in San Jose and can hence not benchmark the Pure3D right now, but I'll do so as soon as I'm back from Comdex. However, the Pure3D is one of the few products available on the market that I would recommend 'blindly'. The performance can only be better than of the other Voodoo cards with only 4 MB RAM.