Preview of 3Dfx Voodoo3

AGP-Performance Test With S3's Quake2 Mon2-Demo

The Mon2-demo I once got from S3 has proven really very helpful since. S3 supplied me with this demo that uses about 9 MB of textures to show me the texture compression feature of Savage3D, but you can also test if a graphics card can move these textures in and out AGP-memory quickly. So far 3Dfx-products looked really bad in this benchmark, let's see if Voodoo3 makes any kind of exception.

Many of you may be surprised to see that Voodoo3 is scoring even worse than Voodoo2 SLI in this large textures test. The explanation for this behavior is pretty simple though, Voodoo2 SLI has with 24 MB vs. 16 MB exactly 50% more onboard memory than Voodoo3 to store some of the textures. This gets even worse when Voodoo3 is using triple buffering, something that Voodoo2 isn't even able to do at all. It's also interesting to see that ATI seems to have a problem with their OpenGL-ICD, which doesn't seem to support the AGP-texturing that's certainly supported by the Rage128-chip. TNT is easily smoking the whole competition, its AGP-support works under OpenGL as well as under Direct3D. I wonder if it is all right with you, that even 3Dfx's latest product still ignores AGP-texturing blatantly.