Performance
The benchmark charts where the Diamond Monster 3D II stands up against all the other 3D boards are already done and will be uploaded together with new comments at the corresponding benchmark pages of my 3D card review. For this page I preferred to present the benchmark data in a slightly different form.
Glide Performance
The Glide performance of the Diamond Monster 3D II can of course only be compared with other cards that are using this proprietary 3Dfx engine. I picked the currently fastest ones, the overkill board Obsidian 100SB from Quantum3D and the Pure3D from Canopus. You can see that the Monster 3D II can easily compete even with the much more expensive Obsidian board. The scaling is almost the same as of the Obsidian, but it starts off considerably higher, giving more performance to owners of CPUs with a low floating point performance. The Obsidian scores slightly higher with powerful Intel CPUs, but the difference is not very significant. You can see that the Voodoo2 scales a lot better than Voodoo, so that you can reach dream results with fast CPUs as well as score better than anything else with slow CPUs.
3D Performance
Except the rare Obsidian boards, NVidia's RIVA 128 has so far been the fastest Direct3D graphic chip. This time is over now, Voodoo2 as used in the Monster 3D II is scoring a lot better. As a matter of fact, the Monster 3D II is even at 800x600 slightly faster than the RIVA at 640x480. Note that you get even a frame rate above 30 with a 6x86MX PR200 when running Turok at 800x600. I guess that's more than great news for owners of Cyrix/IBM CPUs. You can see that the Monster 3D II doesn't only scale excellent with CPU performance, it also starts off higher than anything else and scales at 800x600 still as good as the RIVA at 640x480.
