Introduction
Finally the waiting seems to be over, after Creative Labs did the first shipment of their 3D Blaster Voodoo2 with the 3Dfx Voodoo2 Chip, more and more companies will start launching their Voodoo2 products as well now. The Voodoo2 seems to be one of the most anticipated computer hardware products of all time, there was certainly never anything like this in the graphics sector before.
You have certainly followed all the announcements, statements and comments about Voodoo2 products in the press, particularly the race between Creative Labs and Diamond getting to market first. Creative Labs won that race by quite a distance, but still it’s almost impossible getting the hands on a 3D Blaster Voodoo2 unless you are very lucky. Many rumors came up explaining the shortage of this product, the one that said Creative would have technical problems with the boards is only one of these rumors that lack any kind of truth behind them. The reason why you can still not really get these boards is simply because 3Dfx is only now starting to ramp up the production of the Voodoo2 chip and Creative can only produce boards after they got a ‘drop’ of chips delivered from 3Dfx. Diamond is about to launch their Monster 3D II board now and it could be that there will be more of these boards available now, simply because Diamond was waiting to get a large stock of boards before they planned shipping for the first time. The situation will be reaching normal state within the next 4 to 6 weeks, so that you don’t have to back order and pre-pay Voodoo2 boards anymore pretty soon.
Now since people are starting to have these boards in their systems and others are contemplating buying one, there’s quite a demand for information about this product. Which board is best? What performance can I expect? How compatible will Voodoo2 be? Does overclocking make sense? …. All these questions want to be answered and this article is supposed to help you understand a bit more about the Voodoo2 and the first boards equipped with it.
The Performance of Voodoo2 – The High Impact of the CPU
Most of you will certainly now it, the Voodoo2 offers 3D performance far above everything you’ve seen so far in the PC 3D gaming market. At this time it’s absolutely save to say that Voodoo2 is faster than any other 3D gaming solution on the market. However, how much faster it is and what it takes to get the most out of it is still something to be evaluated.
The Voodoo2 is pretty much the first ever 3D chip which shows you the limitations of your CPU in a severe fashion. Whilst in the past the 3D accelerator used to be the bottleneck in 3D gaming performance, now with the Voodoo2 the bottleneck is the CPU in most of the cases. Testing shows that it takes at least a Pentium II 266 to see a significant impact of the Voodoo2 performance in game benchmarks and this only in case of high resolutions. At 640×480 most games won’t let the Voodoo2 show it’s full performance even in a Pentium II 300 system, which means that most likely even the upcoming Pentium II 400 will maybe only just deliver enough CPU power to max out the Voodoo2. The K6 3D is the only Socket 7 candidate that could take the Voodoo2 closer to its limits, no currently available Socket 7 CPU is able to supply enough CPU power to really use the vast 3D force of the Voodoo2.
You may be wondering what I am going on about, so I will try explaining this issue to you. As you could already read in my article 3D Accelerator Benchmarks – CPU Scaling of 3D Graphic Chips, there are two important things that determine the 3D performance of a system. First the CPU has to calculate the basic 3D geometry of a game scene, which is a procedure that requires a lot of floating point calculations. This is why systems with 6x86MX CPUs are having a some problems with 3D gaming, while offering an amazing integer performance, the floating point performance is pretty low. This geometry data is sent to the 3D accelerator which now does the rendering. This can be done in several steps, triangle setup, one or more rendering passes … As you old see in above mentioned article, you can get to the state where the CPU can supply the geometry data to the 3D accelerator as fast as it wants, the 3 accelerator is just only able to process up to a certain amount of that data and the CPU has to wait until the 3D accelerator is finished before sending the next scene data. In this case you will not experience much or any increase in frame rate even when using a much faster CPU.
As you can imagine, there’s also the possibility that it could be the other way around. the Quantum3D Obsidian 100SB with it’s vast 3D performance based on up to 6 3Dfx Voodoo chips (instead of 2 in the normal Voodoo boards) already showed this phenomenon, the Voodoo2 cards show it even more severely. In this case the 3D accelerator is waiting for the CPU to deliver the geometry data. This means that e.g. overclocking the 3D accelerator chip will not improve 3D performance at all, because the 3D accelerator chip is simply waiting more clock cycles for the 3d geometry data from the CPU. You can also see the surprising effect that frame rate would not drop at all when switching to higher resolutions and adding another Voodoo2 board for SLI will not increase frame rate either, but offer you an even higher resolution at the same frame rate as the lowest resolution.
In the case of the Voodoo2 you will require at least a Pentium II 266 to start seeing a significant difference in frame rate between 640×480 and 800×600 frame rate, in case of two boards in SLI configuration a Pentium II 333 isn’t even fast enough showing a frame rate difference between 640×480 and 800×600. This shows that the frame rate could be a lot higher at 640×480 if the Voodoo2 would get enough data from the CPU. 800×600 and more is occupying the Voodoo2 more, so the time of waiting for the CPU is less.
This is of course not the case for all games. It depends on how many calculations the CPU has got to do before it can send the data to the 3D chip. Actual games that do not require that much CPU power are Acclaim’s Forsaken and Id’s good old GLQuake. In case of GLQuake it only really shows in the pretty obsolete ‘Timedemo demon‘ benchmark, if you use heavy multiplayer benchmark demos like ‘bigass1’ the story is already different and this is most likely the case for Forsaken in network multi player mode as well. Games as Rage’s Incoming or Id’s Quake II are needing a lot of CPU power, so that above said is particularly valid for these games. The trend is going to more complex games though, which means that the effects of the CPU on Voodoo2‘s frame rate will most likely get more rather than less, something you should consider when putting together a kick ass 3D gaming platform.
I’d also like to mention AGP in this context. AGP is supposed to offer us better or faster 3D experience. If you look at it closely though, you will see that this isn’t the case at all currently. If the CPU can’t deliver data to the 3D accelerator fast enough it doesn’t really matter what kind of bus system is used transferring the data to the 3D chip. PCI is absolutely fast enough for that. Even in case of a Pentium II 400 or higher it’s very unlikely that you will see much of a difference in 3D performance when using AGP instead of PCI. AGP is only having an advantage in case of texture transport from main memory, but if the texture is already in the on board memory of the 3D accelerator it doesn’t come into account and receiving the texture data is only one of many steps of the rendering process of a 3D accelerator. I pretty much doubt that Voodoo2 is impacted by too slow texture transport when used as PCI solution at all, which is why I think it’s about time dropping the discussion about a Voodoo2 AGP solution.
Please have a look at the benchmark results which back up the above said.
Overclocking of the Voodoo2 – does it make any sense?
Since I found out how to overclock Voodoo2 boards and published it, you can find this information all over the web. However, it’s questionable if there’s any point in overclocking the Voodoo2 at all, since after all you’re always taking a risk of system instability as well as even damage of the Voodoo2 board.
Simply said it’s not really worth it unless you’ve got a really powerful CPU. If you understand the above said you will know why. It doesn’t really matter how fast the Voodoo2 chip runs, if it has to wait for the CPU to complete its task anyway. You can see an impact of overclocking only when the Voodoo2 is the bottleneck rather than the CPU. Again this requires at least a Pentium II CPU, don’t even bother about it as long as you’ve got a Socket 7 system.
Benchmark data that shows the effect of overclocking of the Voodoo2 can be found at the page ‘Overclocking of the Vooodoo2 – What can we expect?‘.
Reviews of the Actual Boards
Lately I’m asked many times which Voodoo2 board out there is the best to get, which manufacturer is better? If you mean this in terms of performance I can give you two answers:
12 MB boards hardly show any improvement over 8 MB boards, regardless which actual game you’re running. The hype with the additional texture memory having any significant impact on your gaming performance is pretty pointless. As long as the Voodoo2 is waiting for the geometry data from the CPU, it has got all the time in the world for downloading additional textures from main memory. Even in case of systems with fast CPUs the impact is minimal, the difference in rendering time between textures in local memory against textures loaded from main memory is unnoticeable in game play. I really doubt if this will change in the future, so please do me the favor and don’t jump on the marketing hype train. I do admit that I would go for a 12 MB board just to make me feel better, but this does only make sense if there’s no big price difference and you shouldn’t be surprised if your neighbour’s games run just as fast, although he’s only got an 8 MB board.
In terms of performance, there is NO difference between the different graphic vendors at all. The base drivers are provided by 3Dfx and the vendors only make very small changes to it (as actually the case in most other 3D chips as well). This means that the drivers are pretty much all offering the same performance. From the speed point of view you should go with the cheapest board you can get.
This is different if you are looking for special features. Neither Diamond nor Creative Labs are offering e.g. ‘video out’ on their boards, so if you fancy that you may prefer getting a board from Canopus or Quantum3D. The other difference is overclocking stability. The vendors are using all the same kind of 25ns EDO memory, but some tiny difference in components used can decide if you can overclock the Voodoo2 board to e.g. 100 MHz or not. Now as said above, this isn’t really an important issue, because overclocking doesn’t make a lot of sense anyhow, but maybe this could help you making a buying decision. Diamond’s Monster 3D II is for example running a lot more stable when overclocked than Creative Lab’s 3D Blaster Voodoo2. In some games the Creative board fails at 100 MHz within 5-10 minutes even when cooled.
OK, enough said, here are the reviews of Voodoo2 boards I’ve tested so far:
Review of Diamond’s Monster 3D II 8 MB final Board
including SLI results
Review of Creative Lab’s 3D Blaster Voodoo2
comparison to Diamond’s pre-release Voodoo2 board
Pre-View of Diamond’s Monster 3D II Pre-Release Board
the first on line review of a Voodoo2 board world wide
