The Graphic Accelerator Guide

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Considerations For Gamers

You'll now have to decide what kind of games are important to you. Currently the graphically best games are often designed for a special graphic chip, or at least they look best with this one chip. The number one supported 3D graphic chip is nowadays the 3Dfx Voodoo, found on add on cards like the Orchid Righteous3D, Diamond's Monster3D and several others. It looks as if upcoming games will still support this particular chip and since the Voodoo 2 is already on the horizon, you can expect 3Dfx's 'Glide' engine staying supported by many games for a long time. Alternatively to a special 3D chip support, many new games are using Direct3D's new features quite heaviliy, so that it depends on how well the 3D card's driver translates Direct3D to their proprietary engine. PowerVR's PCX1 and PCX2 chips are quite powerful 3D chips, but the cards that use them are highly incompatible. I've seen only very few games that run on this chip properly. If the PCX engine is used directly, the games look awesome though. The only 3D chip to my knowledge, that doesn't have a dedicated 3D engine, but is using Direct3D as its API directly, is NVidia's RIVA 128 chip, currently the fastest Direct3D chip available on the market. The RIVA 128 is wonderful for Direct3D games, but games that are only supporting a bunch of proprietary 3D engines will not run on the RIVA 128. The future will bring almost any game in Direct3D, which will help NVidia's RIVA a lot.

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It is not easy to measure pure 3D performance, because there are so many different ways a 3D engine can be used. Most official benchmarks are using the Direct3D engine of DirectX, like e.g. ZD's 3D Winbench or VNU's Final Reality. These benchmarks can only show you the card's Direct3D performance, hence how well the driver translates Direct3D into the chip's own 3D engine. NVidia's RIVA 128 doesn't need this 'translator', it uses Direct3D as its own API. This is only one reason why the RIVA scores by far best in Direct3D benchmarks. However some games written for that specific 3D engine of a chip can run much faster than the 3D Winbench score would let you expect them to. VQuake for Rendition's Verite 1000 is one good old example. The Verite 1000 was never scoring well in 3D Winbench, but VQuake looked good and ran fast.

Now 3D performance is only one thing, 3D quality is another. There are a lot of 3D features used nowadays, most of them supported and used by DirectX 5, but there will be even more 3D features implemented in DirectX 6. A 3D chip can only support a special amount of 3D features, others are either not supported at all, or special drivers are used that emulate these features. In my latest test I came across only one chip that supports virtually every current 3D feature properly and this is 3Dfx's Voodoo chip. The big let down of the Voodoo chip leads to the other aspect for quality, the 3D screen resolution. The Voodoo chip can only do 640x480 in case of 2 MB frame buffer memory (4 MB cards), as in most of the Voodoo cards, or maximal 800x600 in case the card comes with 6 MB RAM (e.g. Quantum 3D Obsidian 100SB ), 4 MB hereof as frame buffer. NVidia's RIVA 128 chip has got a simular problem, it can't support more than 4 MB onboard memory, only good for a 3D resolution of maximal 800x600. Now it doesn't have to be that bad, since we are quite pleased with our good old television as well, which has a lower resolution than 800x600. The 3D chip and the system CPU have to be powerful enough for running smoothly at this resolution as well. However, I've seen 'Forsaken' at 1024x768 on a PII 300 with an ATI XPERT card and it looks pretty awesome.

Some 3D chips are taking a lot of workload from the CPU, others want decent CPU performance for its operation. PowerVR's PCX chips want at least a Pentium MMX 166 for decent quality, 3Dfx's Voodoo lets games run fast even on systems with weak CPUs and Rendition's new Verite 2100/2200 chip gives a huge improvement to slow CPUs, but fast CPUs are reaching its limit and don't really benefit of this chip anymore. NVidia's RIVA chip seems to scale linearily from 6x86 CPUs up to Pentium II CPUs. Under Direct3D its always the fastest chip.

Another thing you obviously want to take in consideration is the price you've got to pay for the card. Many cards that have good 2D performance as well are pretty expensive. This is often due to the more expensive memory they are using, but it could also be the additional features like e.g. TV out or video compression. Cards with more memory are also more expensive, but they offer higher resolutions in 3D, higher color depth and higher resolutions in 2D. Make sure you don't pay for something you won't need.