Preview of 3Dfx Voodoo3

The Driver

The driver provided was from February 10, 1999, driver version 4.11.01.0409-1.00. This includes Glide2-driver version 2.60.00.0382, Glide3-driver 3.10.00.0381and Mini-VDD version 4.11.01.0409-1.00. I was surprised enough to see that the driver file calls itself '3Dfx Banshee display driver' when you check the version and after comparing this V3-driver with the latest Banshee driver, I found out that the files are looking the same, although they aren't identical. It seems a matter of fact that Voodoo3 uses drivers that are only slightly modified Banshee-drivers, which raises the question if Voodoo3 is nothing but a faster clocked and double pipelined Banshee after all. Unfortunately I didn't try to run Banshee with those drivers or Voodoo3 with the original Banshee-drivers, but I'll do that as soon as I'm in my lab again.

3Dfx has still not been able to provide a real OpenGL-ICD with the Voodoo3-drivers, so that you have to use the Mini-GL of Banshee if you want to play Quake2 or any other OpenGL-based game. Without an ICD there will be no support for professional OpenGL-applications. It seems as if 3Dfx takes even longer than Matrox to finish their long overdue OpenGL-ICD, which I consider as pretty embarrassing for both companies. NVIDIA, ATI, 3DLabs and S3 are much more advanced here, they all finished their ICD quite a while ago.

Problems

I had a really hard time running Quake2 at resolutions of above 1024x768, because often only one third of the screen was visible, the rest remained black. There was a particular problem at 1152x864, where the picture produced by the Voodoo3 was never able to fill the whole monitor screen. I managed to run Quake2 at 1600x1200 and 1280x960 only after switching the desktop resolution to 1600x1200 in the first place before starting Quake2. In Shogo the Voodoo3 let's you choose a resolution of 1600x1200 also, but none of the moving objects in the game will be textured anymore if you run it at this resolution, which looks pretty horrible of course. I guess the Voodoo3's lack of AGP-texture support is mainly responsible for that behavior. The only other problem that I found was Turok2, which would crash immediately after I started it, way before I could choose between Glide or D3D. I found out that this was due to the Glide3-driver coming with the drivers I had, which was of revision 3.10.00.0381. After replacing it with glide3x.dll ver. 3.10.00.0363 out of the driver set from January 22, 1999 Turok2 ran fine.

Image Quality

My super 21" monitor from Sony did unfortunately not travel with me to the US, so that I could not yet test the Voodoo3 with this reference CRT. I will do that as soon as I've returned to Europe. The 3D-image quality was fine in all the games I ran. As a matter of fact, I couldn't find any obvious difference between Voodoo3, NVIDIA RIVA TNT and ATI Rage128 at 16 bit rendering. We all know that Voodoo3 cannot do real 32bit rendering, so that I didn't do any comparison here.