Introduction

Creative won the race of which company will be first on the market with a Voodoo² 3D accelerator and after we’ve seen the performance of the pre-release Voodoo² card from Diamond, it’s now time to check how well a final product will perform. The 3D Blaster Voodoo² comes with 12 MB of onboard memory, 4 MB frame buffer and 4 MB texture buffer for each of the two Texelfx2 units, making 12 MB altogether. This is 4 MB more than what Diamond is planning to put on their Monster 3D II card, which is only one of the reasons why Diamond and Creative didn’t have anything better to do than throwing mud at each other in the press previous to the release date of the 3D Blaster Voodoo², with most of the weight on Diamond’s side. Now, since Creative Labs started shipping their 12 MB Voodoo² board, Diamond changed their mind from ‘offering a 12 MB solution shows that Creative doesn’t have any idea of marketing‘ to ‘Powered by the Voodoo² graphics chipset from 3Dfx Interactive, the new 12MB Monster 3D II will ship early in the second quarter of 1998 ‘. Isn’t it always nice to see how people can suddenly change their minds? A similar thing must have happened within Creative though, because Electronic Boutique took pre-orders for 6 MB 3D Blaster Voodoo² boards back in January and suddenly Creative came up with the idea of selling 8 and 12 MB boards instead.

Anyway, we customers couldn’t care less about this unpleasant soap opera between Diamond and Creative Labs, we want to know which product is best for our needs. One of the things that are of major interest is the difference between the 6, 8 and 12 MB versions of Voodoo² boards. The preview of Diamond’s Monster 3D II already showed that the Voodoo² can run games at 800×600 just as fine as at the default of 640×480, so that it has to be considered as unwise producing a 6 MB board that won’t allow you a resolution of 800×600. The difference between the 8 and the 12 MB version however is determined by the difference in texture buffer size, similar to the difference between Diamond’s good old Monster 3D and Canopus’ Pure3D Voodoo accelerators, where the Pure3D also comes with double the texture memory. Tests showed that there was hardly any game so far, that would be able taking any significant advantage of the 2 MB more texture RAM and hence there’s now the question if the 12 MB Voodoo² cards are mainly a marketing gag or if we really get additional performance for additional money.

The Box

The 3D Blaster Voodoo² comes without any game bundle. In the box you’ll find a CD with the latest drivers, a pass through cable which is significantly thinner than the one shipped with Diamond Voodoo and Voodoo² boards and a SLI cable that allows you to hook up two 3D Blasters together, enabling either double performance at the same resolution or higher resolution at sustained performance. In my box there was also a blue piece of paper which said that the SLI cable is too long, 3″ instead of 1.5″, which could be the reason for trouble in SLI mode. I guess that Creative Labs will solve that problem finally, but it shows how desperate Creative must have been shipping this product as early as possible, even when they would have to include a too long SLI cable.

The small manual is straight forward, showing you how to plug in the card, how to connect the pass through cable from the 2D graphics card to the 3D Blaster and how to hook up two 3D Blasters for SLI mode. The installation for Windows 95 is straight forward and the CD includes also DirectX 5 and drivers for Windows NT.

Running the 3D Blaster Voodoo²

One day before the official launch of the 3D Blaster Voodoo² diamond announced that they’ve found a heat flaw in the Voodoo² reference design, being the cause of crashes under higher temperature. Creative as well as 3Dfx weren’t very happy about that, Creative because they thought it was directly targeted at the 3D Blaster launch day and 3Dfx because Diamond wouldn’t tell them where exactly the problem is for obvious reasons. Creative is using exactly 3Dfx’ reference design, so if there is a bug in the board it show up in my tests. I did not come across any crashes caused by the 3D Blaster although I really strained it, putting a plastic bag around the system to get it hot as well as several night runs of Quake and Quake2 in my own system, which is a dual Pentium II 300 box with a Permedia 2 card and 2 Seagate Cheetah drives, so you can imagine that this box is really hot inside. I can not say that the 3D Blaster Voodoo² has shown any instability.

Creative Labs are not supplying their own drivers, they rather supply you with the reference drivers from 3Dfx. This is completely fair enough, after all the 3D Blaster is the reference design as well. The D3D drivers used were 4.10.01.0052-RC1 (release candidate 1), thus pretty much the first official drivers. WinGlide was version 2.5.

If you want to run a Voodoo² board at maximum performance you’ve got to do some minimal tweaks. Voodoo card owners are used to put some “SET SST_…” commands in either the autoexec.bat or in some special game batch files. The most common thing with Voodoo was to disable the ‘Wait for vertical retrace”, commands “SET FX_GLIDE_SWAPINTERVAL=0” for Glide games and “SET SST_SWAP_EN_WAIT_ON_VSYNC=0” for D3D games. These times are over now, you can change these and a few more settings in the display properties directly. This is how I would recommend to change the settings and these are the settings I used for testing.

Overclocking

All the owners of a Voodoo card know it, there was a simple way of overclocking the Voodoo to higher clocks than the default of 50 MHz and this was improving the performance by a pretty significant amount. You simply put ‘SET SST_GRXCLK=…’ in the autoexec.bat or a special game batch file and you changed the clock frequency of the Voodoo chip(s). It’s not quite that simple with the Voodoo², but it’s still possible. 3Dfx changed the variables from DOS environment variables to string variables within the Windows 95 registry, which was a wise decision. Hence you’ve got to edit your Windows 95 registry, one of the things that many people are afraid of. I just recommend backing up the registry previous to any change, which btw goes easiest by just copying the ‘system.dat’ and ‘user.dat’ in the Windows directory to a save one.

• Start the Registry Editor, choose ‘Edit‘, ‘Find‘ and search for ‘SSTV2‘.
• This will lead you directly to where you’ve got to be, ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWARE3Dfx InteractiveVoodoo²‘.
• This key has got 2 subkeys, by the name of ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWARE3Dfx InteractiveVoodoo²D3D‘ and ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWARE3Dfx InteractiveVoodoo²Glide‘. You will have to work with both if you want to change the clock speed of the Voodoo² for Direct3D as well as Glide games.
• Now right click on either one of these two keys, select ‘New‘ and then ‘String Value‘. Call that new variable ‘SSTV2_GRXCLK‘.
• Double click on the new variable you just added and enter the clock speed you want the Voodoo² to run at in decimals.
• Default is ’90’ for 90 MHz, so you obviously want to get higher. Please be aware of the risk of overheating and maybe even destroying your Voodoo² board, I won’t take any liability. I don’t think that overclocking the Voodoo² is necessary and it doesn’t give you that much of a performance increase as well.

While I’m writing these lines I hear that someone has already programmed a overclocking utility based on my Voodoo² overclocking comments at Voodoo Extreme.

Benchmarking

I ran the benchmarks only on two systems so far, I will add more soon though. The tests were run on

• Pentium II 300 system
  Abit LX6 motherboard
  64 MB SDRAM
  Quantum Fireball SE 4.3 GB EIDE HDD
  Windows 95 OSR 2.1

and on

• Pentium MMX 200 system
  Elitegroup P5SD-B motherboard
  64 MB SDRAM
  Quantum Fireball SE 4.3 GB EIDE HDD
  Windows 95 OSR 2.1
  SIS GART driver rev. 1.1

The settings of Creative’s 3D Blaster Voodoo² as well as of Diamond’s Monster 3D II pre-release board were as shown above, the Voodoo² clock frequency was 90 MHz for both boards. The RIVA AGP reference board was running with NVIDIA’s latest reference drivers, including their beta OpenGL ICD. ATI’s Xpert@Play AGP ran with the latest ‘turbo’ drivers (build 2312) and all the other cards ran the latest drivers to date (Feb 27, 1998). The refresh rate for all 2D/3D combo cards was 120 Hz for 640×480 and 100 Hz for 800×600. The 3Dfx cards used the usual 60 Hz refresh rate in both resolutions.

INCOMING

INCOMING from Rage is a stunning looking game that really needs some kick ass hardware if you want to run it smoothly. You need at least 30 fps if you want to be able enjoying the game, so you definitely need a powerful CPU or a very good 3D accelerator, especially if you want to take advantage of higher resolutions. Here some more new screen shots from Voodoo Extreme: shot1 shot2 shot3

The two Voodoo² cards are ruling this benchmark quite clearly in the P II 300 system, but you can see that the game requires so much CPU power that even with a Pentium MMX 200 the differences between Voodoo² cards and its competitors get pretty tiny.

800×600 is the resolution Voodoo² boards love. It’s hard to believe, but in case of the Pentium MMX system The Voodoo² cards run it even faster at 800×600 than at 640×480. This should be another prove that there’s no point in building 6 MB Voodoo² boards, you really want to use the high performance of Voodoo² at 800×600. Note the tiny difference between the 12 MB 3D Blaster Voodoo² and the 8 MB Monster 3D II.

FORSAKEN

Forsaken is a great looking game in Descent style. Opposite to Incoming it does not require much CPU power for running it smoothly, so even owners of K6 and 6x86MX CPUs have got a chance of enjoying this game.

Voodoo² rules, the Obsidian from Quantum3D is right behind it. Again you won’t find a difference between the 3D Blaster and the Monster 3D II.

800×600 makes the lead of the Voodoo² boards even clearer, again no real difference between the 12 and the 8 MB board.

TUROK

Turok is a 1st person shooter with nice and colorful graphics. This benchmark is using the downloadable demo of Turok, not the actual game. for some strange reason the game scores much higher frame rates so don’t compare them with these ones here.

Turok is also not as CPU consuming, that nothing really changes between the P II 300 and the P200 MMX system, except an overall decrease in framerate.

QUAKE II

I don’t think I’ve got much to say about Quake II. Quake II wants FPU, that’s why K6 and particularly 6x86MX CPUs have a significant disadvantage in playability.

The picture is again as we know it. The two Voodoo² boards are scoring higher than anything else and there’s as good as no difference between the 12 and the 8 MB version.

800×600 makes the lead of the Voodoo² boards even more obvious, again no visible reason to favorize the 12 MB 3D Blaster Voodoo² over the Monster 3D II.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that 3D accelerators with the 3Dfx Voodoo² chip are scoring best in all of the benchmarks. We also saw that Voodoo² can show it’s real superiority at the 800×600 resolution. That’s why we don’t want 6 MB Voodoo² boards which restrict us to only 640×480. The benchmarks also show that you rather have a fast Pentium II system if you want to push the Voodoo² to the edge.

Hundreds of you asked me if the 12 MB 3D Blaster Voodoo² is any better than the 8 MB Monster 3D II. The answer is certainly not ‘yes’, I don’t want to put a clear ‘no’ here as well though. Since the day when AGP was launched we are listening to those stories of games which are using so much larger textures, thus requiring AGP. What I’ve seen of G-Police hasn’t impressed me and I wonder if high resolution textures on low resolution rendered polygons are looking so much better. What I expect are objects consisting of a lot more polygons, as e.g. Incoming shows. If eventually there should be a point in using really large textures there will also be a point of using 8 MB texture memory rather than 4 MB on a Voodoo² board. For now it doesn’t give you much of an advantage though and by the day when these games are out we can probably already expect the next generation 3D chips on the market. A 12 MB Voodoo² board is something for people who want to have the possibly fastest and who don’t care about the additional cost. However, the ‘normal Joe’ will most likely be just as happy with an 8 MB Voodoo board. Creative Labs will supply both versions and so will Diamond.