Disclaimer
The Diamond Monster 3D II, which I received directly from Diamond’s Vice President Corporate Marketing and the European Marketing Manager is at final beta state. The main difference to the final board is that the memory runs at only 83 MHz instead of 90 MHz clock. The results of the final board will be even a bit higher. The here published results are neither wrong nor misleading, the 3D performance of the Monster 3D II will be higher than of any currently available 3D card, which can already be seen by the published results.
All information stating that the tested hardware would be alpha state is incorrect as well as the information that Diamond disagreed with the testing of this board. The opposite is the case and can be found out directly from Diamond’s PR department.
After the literally cool Diamond Monster Party (at freezing 4 degrees centigrade) in Paris on January 29, 1998, I was lucky enough to be one of the few that returned home with a Monster 3D II in my hand luggage. As 99% of you will certainly know, this new 3D add-on board comes with nothing less than the eagerly awaited Voodoo2 chip from 3Dfx, which is supposed to show the rest of the 3D chip manufacturers what 3D acceleration is really about.
I never really covered 3Dfx’ Voodoo2 chip here on my site, because you could find lots of information about this amazing new 3D chip all over the net and I prefer not copying or rehashing other people’s stuff, since this is done to myself to an extend that’s annoying enough already. Nevertheless will I now try to summarize the most important features of Voodoo2 in short:
Voodoo2
- has about 3 times the polygon calculation performance of Voodoo and about twice the fill rate performance of Voodoo.
- comes with one Pixelfx2 and two Texelfx2 chips. Voodoo came only with one Texelfx. This enables Voodoo2 to render multiple (practically dual) textures per pixel in one single pass, used in several special game effects. In the past this rendering of multiple textures required multipass (“yeah, Lilou”, only for Fifth Element fans), as e.g. in GLQuake.
- supports tri-linear filtering without a performance hit, resulting in even better image quality
- supports edge anti-aliasing
- supports bump-mapping (software only)
- Voodoo2 will also only run in full screen mode
- one Pixelfx2 has now got enough performance to render in 800×600 fast enough, so that it makes sense using 4 MB frame buffer, enabling resolutions of up to 800×600, however it will be up to the card manufacturer if 2 or 4 MB frame buffer will be used
- you can use two Voodoo2 cards in your system, connected with a pass through cable. These two cards can do ‘SLI’ = Scan Line Interleaving. This is nothing else than that every odd line of the image is rendered by one, the even line is rendered by the other Voodoo2 card. This about doubles the performance and enables resolutions up to 1024×768. SLI has already been used by Quantum3D in their Obsidian boards, based on the old Voodoo chip. The Obsidian 100SB e.g. uses SLI by placing two complete Voodoo units on one board. I guess you are aware of the amazing performance of the Obsidian 100SB. I expect Quantum3D to come out with a high performance Voodoo2 board soon, which will probably use as much memory as possible and also include 2 Voodoo2 units for a one board SLI solution.
- there will indeed be an AGP version of Voodoo2 cards, but I guess this is mainly a marketing gag, so that 3Dfx doesn’t look too bad regarding AGP technology. The AGP Voodoo2 card can only work with a PCI 2D card, there is no chance of doubling performance via SLI, because this works only with two PCI cards, Voodoo2 doesn’t support any real AGP features as side band addressing, DiME, 2x, … instead of this it’s only taking advantage of the higher data bandwidth of the AGP port. 3Dfx calls this ‘PCI 66 Mode’, because of the AGP’s higher clock rate of 66 MHz. The AGP card can be faster than one PCI card, as long as data bandwidth is the bottleneck in a game. Two PCI cards in SLI will definitely be faster than one AGP card though.
- Voodoo2 cards can come in several different memory configurations, a good way of finding out if the card manufacturer is only interested in making some quick money by using as few RAM as possible. As already said above, Voodoo2 can use up to 4 MB frame buffer, offering resolutions of up to 800×600 when Z-buffer is used. You also can equip it with only 2 MB frame buffer, limiting your resolution to a max of 640×480. The same story is valid for the texture memory. Each Texelfx2 chip can either use 2 or 4 MB of memory. This gives the following possible configurations: 2-2-2, 4-2-2, 2-4-4, 4-4-4
- Diamond’s Monster 3D II will offer resolutions of up to 800×600, coming in 4-2-2 configuration = 8 MB onboard RAM.
- Voodoo2 will run at 90 MHz by default, it uses 25ns EDO RAM
- Voodoo2 will be less CPU dependent, as we will see in my benchmarks, but it scales a lot better than Voodoo. This means that it’s always faster than Voodoo, at a lower percentage in systems with a weak FPU, at a very high percentage in systems with a powerful FPU.
- D3D games will all be compatible with Voodoo2, Glide games are also supposed to run just as well on Voodoo2 cards, but we’ll see if there won’t be some compatibility issues with some games in the beginning.
- Voodoo2 is so much faster than any other 3D chip, that some games will include a special version for the high performance of Voodoo2.
As already said, Diamond’s Monster 3D II will come with 8 MB 25ns EDO RAM, supporting up to 800×600 3D resolution with 16 bit Z-buffering. This makes it already better than the announced products of some of its competitors, which are only using 6 MB RAM, hence castrating the card to a max. resolution of only 640×480, although it has well enough performance for 800×600. Diamond will offer two cards running in SLI mode, which Diamond calls MegaMonsterTM.
The well known Monster 3D with Voodoo chip was the most sold Voodoo board and Diamond hopes to continue this with the Monster 3D II. Canopus will most likely supply us with a more sophisticated Voodoo2 card, which may not be quite as close to 3Dfx’ reference board as the Monster 3D II.
Although I don’t usually make free company links, here the links to Diamond’s specs of the Monster 3D II and about the included games.
But now I don’t want to bore you with theory any longer, let’s get to the practical results.
Drivers
Currently, the Monster 3D II comes with the 3Dfx reference drivers, as you can see at the missing Diamond logo and the missing ‘Monster 3D II’ in the Voodoo2 settings.
3Dfx really deserves it, so that I even give this plug for them. I know that this window is certainly the least important one for you.
The System Info is showing you the configuration and the driver revisions I used, which saves me from writing that down.
This is the most important panel, the Advanced Properties. Please note that I ran the benchmarks with exactly these settings. The ‘don’t synch to refresh rate’ feature did not cause any tearing in any of the test systems.
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 800×600 slightly faster than the RIVA at 640×480. Note that you get even a frame rate above 30 with a 6x86MX PR200 when running Turok at 800×600. 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 800×600 still as good as the RIVA at 640×480.
GLQuake Performance
A lot has been written about 110+ fps of Voodoo2 with GLQuake, but I will not do you the favor and test with the pretty useless ‘demo1’ benchmark, just to reach astronomical frame rates. Results with ‘bigass1’ are much more accurate.
I guess these results are impressive enough. Even the Obsidian looks pretty old against the new Monster 3D II. 74.4 fps in bigass1 are simply mind blowing and the 55 fps under 800×600 should even enlight people with the slowest brains. The Monster 3D II is not only perfect for Pentium II owners, 6x86MX users will get the highest frame rates even at 800×600 as well.
Quake II Performance
Quake II seems to love the Monster 3D II even more. Even at 800×600 it’s still faster than anything else. Any more questions?
Conclusion
We all expected a winner when 3Dfx announced the Voodoo2. The Diamond Monster 3D II shows that we weren’t disappointed. I have hardly ever tested any computer hardware product that impressed me as much as this 3D graphics board. I can even go as far as saying that everyone who wants to play 3D games and doesn’t get a Voodoo2 board has to be considered as seriously mislead. The Monster 3D II shows that
- it’s sets a new standard in 3D performance as well as quality
- it can be used with weak as well as powerful CPUs, it will always offer the best 3D performance
- it gives you mind blowing high 3D performance in systems with at least a K6 233
- it will currently be hard to find any 3D game that will use the vast performance offered by Voodoo2
- for the time being two boards running SLI will mainly be interesting for a resolution of 1024×768, which is only possible via SLI. The performance that SLI offers for lower resolutions is currently way over what 3D games require.
- boards with less than 4 MB frame buffer memory are obsolete in my eyes, because the performance at 800×600 is so high, that is would be a waste if you couldn’t use it
- If I ever felt well recommending a product that is just about to be released, then it is now with Diamond’s Monster 3D II. I wonder which reason could be serious enough for not getting this card, but getting a second rate 3D board instead. Who was able to pay 200 bucks for a Voodoo board shouldn’t have problems to pay 250 or a few more bucks for this one. I’d rather buy a 2D card that offers me a first class 2D acceleration and a crisp and sharp picture, get a Voodoo2 board as well and feel happy for the next 12 months than buying a 2D/3D solution with questionable 2D abilities and only average 3D performance, that I want to get rid off within the next few months because I start crying looking at other people’s Voodoo2 performance.
I guess you get the picture.
