Buying a Graphics Card - 3Dfx

3Dfx was the market leader in 3D accelerators for a long time. Its original offering the Voodoo 1, was a revolutionary design and changed the way graphics were shown on games. many people rushed to buy these cards to add to the speed and quality of there games. The Voodoo 1 was an add on card that required a pass through cable to the 2D display card that every PC had. The Voodoo 1 used a PCI slot and just plugged into the back of the standard 2D card. This invention by 3Dfx allowed games creators to use a different style of writing games allowing the games to come alive.

The Voodoo 1 is long since gone, and next on the list was the originally titled Voodoo 2. This was the same type as the Voodoo 1, it required a pass through cable and a standard 2D card to run off. The Voodoo 2 came with 12Mb of memory and was generally a faster card., You can still find the odd Voodoo 2 card about from either Diamond or Creative, but they are no longer produced. If the game is not too stressful and you have a semi-decent 2D card in your machine, you can get away with a Voodoo 2 in games such as Half-life and Unreal Tournament. 

The Voodoo 3 was the first combo card from 3Dfx, by combo card I mean that it did the job of both the 2D card as well as the job as the accelerator. This type of card is by far and away the most popular, since it only uses the one slot and you only pay for the one card. They are of course a little more expensive than the add on cards but well worth it. If you building a system now or looking at getting an accelerator for the first time then the Voodoo 3 3000 would be quite a good option while the stocks still last. As I have mentioned before 3Dfx are no longer producing cards because they have been taken over by Nvidia, but there are still cards for sale and stock will be there for quite a few months yet. 

After the release of the Voodoo 3 3000 came the real hit from 3Dfx, the Voodoo 5 5500. This card had a dual processor format for extra speed, it came with 64MB* of memory onboard and the ability to do hardware FSAA (Full Screen Anti Aliasing), this was a great technology to have for the gamers because it smoothed out the screen sprites to make them look a lot better without compromising the speed too much. Other cards had the ability to do FSAA but never really had the hardware technology or the speed to cope with its demands. It was up against pretty stiff opposition with the Geforce 2 from Nvidia and the Radeon, a long awaited card from ATI. The Voodoo 5 5500 didn't keep up to them as well in terms of speed, don't get me wrong the card is certainly fast enough to cope with anything that's thrown at it, it just wasn't "as" fast as the other two. On the plus side for the card though was the fact the image quality was better than the others due to FSAA. Coupled with the fact that people were still buying 3Dfx cards because they remember the name from the original cards, 3Dfx were still making good sales on the card. If your going on the 3Dfx route for your new card then this is the power card of the group, because it uses so much power, the standard AGP port couldn't provide enough power to run it, so it needs a free power connector from your power supply. 

* storing textures for 2 processors on the Voodoo 5 5500 needed to be done separately for each processor, so in effect the card had 32Mb of memory for each processor, the card cannot store 64Mb of individual textures.

Note - If you have an Athlon system which already requires a lot of power, seek advice from your computer dealer to check whether or not your PSU will be able to handle the power requirements without causing errors. This is not likely to be a problem, but it has been known to cause un explained graphical and other errors.  

After the Voodoo 5 came the Voodoo 4 4500, surprising you may think, but not really, the Voodoo 4 was a cut down from the Voodoo 5, even though it was released later. The Voodoo was was aimed to take on the likes of the Geforce 2 MX and the Radeon 32Mb SDR. The Voodoo 4 4500 was a single processor unit with 32Mb of memory but still capable of lots of things. at about half the cost of the Voodoo 5, you might be thinking that this is a better option for you. Games is always the controller of what hardware you need and if your quite content to play games at 60FPS (which to the eye is near perfect) and don't want 100FPS (resolution dependant) then you don't need to always buy the quickest card that out there. Its a case of money, buy what you can afford unless your not a gamer then get something that's cheap and cheerful, for the best of both worlds I think you'll be happy with the Voodoo 3 or the Voodoo 4.

Update - 3Dfx have been bought out by Nvidia and all products on the Voodoo range of cards have stopped. Voodoo 5 5500 are still about in the odd place mainly second hand but support with new drivers etc has ceased except in house drivers created by people other than who used to work at 3Dfx.

BACK

NEXT

PantherProducts - Articles - Games Zone - Making Money Online - Product Reviews - Jargon Dictionary