Preview of 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee, S3 Savage3D and NVIDIA RIVA TNT

Forsakenmark

Forsaken is one of the many games that use the common single texturing mode, so that a second texture unit as in the RIVA TNT or Voodoo2 chip is not used.

The graph shows that two Voodoo2 chips in SLI mode are still far ahead of the competition. Banshee can show that its higher fill rate than a single Voodoo2 results in a higher frame rate. The alpha TNT chip at 70 MHz is just about as fast as Banshee, and the Savage3D only manages the last place with quite a bit of a distance. Interestingly Forsaken wouldn't run at 800x600, it crashed regardless what I did. It must be a bug either within the Pentium II L2 cache controller or in the Savage3D driver, because Celeron runs just fine at 800x600 at 266 as well as at 400 MHz.

The picture isn't much different. As you know from my previous Voodoo2 articles , every CPU less powerful than a Pentium II 300 cannot satisfy the needs of a Voodoo2 chip, so that the CPU is the limiting factor, resulting in identical frame rates at 640x480 and 800x600. Almost the same is valid for Banshee. Savage3D seems to really need CPU power, the frame rates at 640x480 are identical to the 800x600 ones too and the values are just about half of Banshee's. It is not quite clear to me why a single Voodoo2 scored higher than Banshee at 640x480, but I guess that the D3D driver of Banshee still needs some more work. After all it was only at 'alpha 2' level.