Introduction
I receive a lot of mail nowadays from people who don’t know which graphic accelerator card to get and I can understand that there are a lot of choices for all kind of different needs. There’s a lot of hype thrown at us from all the different card and chip manufacturers on the graphic market too and you can easily face a huge disappointment if you should make the wrong choice.
The difficulty in choosing the right video accelerator card comes from the different needs we have for this piece of hardware. As usual we’d prefer getting a card that can do everything at an excellent level and this if somehow possible for a low price as well. However the miracolous cheap all-round card isn’t out yet and I guess that it will possibly take forever until all our needs will be pleased. Hence we have to make our mind up what is most important to us and also how much money we are willing to spend.
The first question we have to ask ourselves is if we will use our system mainly for professional work or mainly for games. Most professional cards are not great at games and vice versa. If you’ve already got a video card in your system, ask yourself if you’re pleased with its 2D performance at professional work and if you just want to purchase an add on card for games. In this case you still have the professional performance of your current video card and add some real good gaming performance with the add on 3D card. You will need an additional PCI slot though.
Considerations for Gamers
In case gaming is most that you do on your system and you couldn’t care less for Windows NT, true color and OpenGL, you want to go for a pure 3D gaming card or get an add on card.
Direct3D or Proprietary 3D Engine?
You’ll now have to decide what kind of games are important to you. Currently the graphically best games are often designed for a special graphic chip, or at least they look best with this one chip. The number one supported 3D graphic chip is nowadays the 3Dfx Voodoo, found on add on cards like the Orchid Righteous3D, Diamond’s Monster3D and several others. It looks as if upcoming games will still support this particular chip and since the Voodoo 2 is already on the horizon, you can expect 3Dfx’s ‘Glide’ engine staying supported by many games for a long time. Alternatively to a special 3D chip support, many new games are using Direct3D’s new features quite heaviliy, so that it depends on how well the 3D card’s driver translates Direct3D to their proprietary engine. PowerVR’s PCX1 and PCX2 chips are quite powerful 3D chips, but the cards that use them are highly incompatible. I’ve seen only very few games that run on this chip properly. If the PCX engine is used directly, the games look awesome though. The only 3D chip to my knowledge, that doesn’t have a dedicated 3D engine, but is using Direct3D as its API directly, is NVidia’s RIVA 128 chip, currently the fastest Direct3D chip available on the market. The RIVA 128 is wonderful for Direct3D games, but games that are only supporting a bunch of proprietary 3D engines will not run on the RIVA 128. The future will bring almost any game in Direct3D, which will help NVidia’s RIVA a lot.
3D Performance
It is not easy to measure pure 3D performance, because there are so many different ways a 3D engine can be used. Most official benchmarks are using the Direct3D engine of DirectX, like e.g. ZD’s 3D Winbench or VNU’s Final Reality. These benchmarks can only show you the card’s Direct3D performance, hence how well the driver translates Direct3D into the chip’s own 3D engine. NVidia’s RIVA 128 doesn’t need this ‘translator’, it uses Direct3D as its own API. This is only one reason why the RIVA scores by far best in Direct3D benchmarks. However some games written for that specific 3D engine of a chip can run much faster than the 3D Winbench score would let you expect them to. VQuake for Rendition’s Verite 1000 is one good old example. The Verite 1000 was never scoring well in 3D Winbench, but VQuake looked good and ran fast.
3D Quality !
Now 3D performance is only one thing, 3D quality is another. There are a lot of 3D features used nowadays, most of them supported and used by DirectX 5, but there will be even more 3D features implemented in DirectX 6. A 3D chip can only support a special amount of 3D features, others are either not supported at all, or special drivers are used that emulate these features. In my latest test I came across only one chip that supports virtually every current 3D feature properly and this is 3Dfx’s Voodoo chip. The big let down of the Voodoo chip leads to the other aspect for quality, the 3D screen resolution. The Voodoo chip can only do 640×480 in case of 2 MB frame buffer memory (4 MB cards), as in most of the Voodoo cards, or maximal 800×600 in case the card comes with 6 MB RAM (e.g. Quantum 3D Obsidian 100SB) , 4MB hereof as frame buffer. NVidia’s RIVA 128 chip has got a simular problem, it can’t support more than 4 MB onboard memory, only good for a 3D resolution of maximal 800×600. Now it doesn’t have to be that bad, since we are quite pleased with our good old television as well, which has a lower resolution than 800×600. The 3D chip and the system CPU have to be powerful enough for running smoothly at this resolution as well. However, I’ve seen ‘Forsaken’ at 1024×768 on a PII 300 with an ATI XPERT card and it looks pretty awesome.
How Powerful is Your CPU?
Some 3D chips are taking a lot of workload from the CPU, others want decent CPU performance for its operation. PowerVR’s PCX chips want at least a Pentium MMX 166 for decent quality, 3Dfx’s Voodoo lets games run fast even on systems with weak CPUs and Rendition’s new Verite 2100/2200 chip gives a huge improvement to slow CPUs, but fast CPUs are reaching its limit and don’t really benefit of this chip anymore. NVidia’s RIVA chip seems to scale linearily from 6×86 CPUs up to Pentium II CPUs. Under Direct3D its always the fastest chip.
Price !
Another thing you obviously want to take in consideration is the price you’ve got to pay for the card. Many cards that have good 2D performance as well are pretty expensive. This is often due to the more expensive memory they are using, but it could also be the additional features like e.g. TV out or video compression. Cards with more memory are also more expensive, but they offer higher resolutions in 3D, higher color depth and higher resolutions in 2D. Make sure you don’t pay for something you won’t need.
Considerations for Professionals – Picture Quality
If you are working on your computer professionally one of the most important things is the picture quality. This is achieved by a high quality and high clocked RAMDAC. Most of the new graphic chips have included the RAMDAC internally, thus saving cost, but the best picture quality is still produced by an external RAMDAC. The most popular cards with external RAMDACs are Matrox Millennium I and II and Number Nine’s Revolution 3D. These cards are still offering you the sharpest and cleanest picture on the screen. If you have got an expensive monitor, you want to use the high refresh rates your monitor supports. As a simple rule you should at least have a refresh rate of 85 Hz available for all the reolutions you want to use. Refresh rates of 120 and more sound nice, but they won’t give you much of an advantage anymore. Responsible for this is again the RAMDAC. The higher its clock rate, the higher are possible refresh rates.
2D Performance
The 2D performance was what used to determine the quality of a graphic card in the past. Now 2D acceleration seems pretty close to the limit and almost all cards are offering a good 2D performance, at least at 16 bit color modi. Good 2D performance in true color is a virtue that’s pretty rare still though. Matrox and Number Nine always used to fight about the 2D performance crown and it hasn’t changed much still. If you are working really professionally at your computer, you can impossibly use Microsoft’s mouse driver collection called Windows 95. Hence you are either using Windows NT or some really good OS that’s not from the monopolist. NT drivers are very important for professional cards and the NT performance should be more important than the Windows 95 performance. There is often quite a bit of a difference between NT and 95 performance.
OpenGL, Heidi
For people that use a real graphic workstation with CAD and/or 3D rendering, SGI’s OpenGL as well as Heidi are of major importance. Nowadays if you hear ‘PC’ and ‘OpenGL’ one company comes into your minds … 3DLabs. I will not discuss the real high end chips of 3DLabs, since this is off topic on this website, but 3DLabs’ new Permedia 2 chip is one of the most impressive graphic chips on the market today in my opinion. For 3DLabs the Permedia 2 is nothing but a low end chip for the mass market, but amongst its competitors it’s quite a gem in terms of professional work. In mid to higher prized systems cards with the Permedia 2 will offer you the best OpenGL performance combined with a good 2D and a fairly impressive Direct3D performance.
AGP or PCI
Since the new advanced graphics port (AGP) has been released, you may wonder what interface to go for. I think you should certainly get a board with Intel’s new LX chipset, in case you want to use a Pentium II system. In this case you won’t do much wrong going for an AGP card. However please be aware that there’s currently hardly any performance advantage of AGP over PCI. In case of Socket 7 there’s still the problem that there aren’t many AGP motherboards available yet, but this will hopefully change soon, now that the PA-2012 was released.
Asus 3D Explorer 3000 AGP
Asus is also using NVidia’s successful RIVA 128 chip and puts in on a board that seems very simular to the original reference board from NVidia. The performance is as expected, putting it in the first league in Direct3D benchmarks, although not quite as fast as the Diamond Viper V330. The 2D and OpenGL results are also less than the results of the Viper V330, but still quite considerable.
Asus promised me new improved drivers as well as video in/out support in the next release, so I am waiting until I will receive these samples. Until then I rather recommend Diamond’s Viper V330 unless you find the 3D Explorer at a very competitive price.
3D Image Quality
Motoracer looks as good as it gets.
Final Reality Benchmark: You can see the typical lack of the NVidia RIVA 128 when you look at the cross, no tri-linear filtering, also no cloud/fog visible.
ATI XPERT@WORK/PLAY
ATI’s Rage Pro chip is currently the only high end AGP chip, that supports the AGP x2 mode. This doesn’t necessarily make it faster than other chips, but as AGP improves, the Rage Pro can take advantage of it. ATI is shipping two different cards with this chip, the XPERT@Work and the XPERT@Play, both in AGP and PCI versions. The XPERT@Play only differs for the XPERT@Work by offering an additional video out for connecting it to your TV in case ou fancy that. The performance of both cards is identical.
The XPERT cards are also available for quite a while and the drivers have been improved a lot as well. Whilst the Direct3D performance of the XPERT cards could hardly reach the magic 3Dfx results until a few weeks ago, the latest (but publicy unavailable) performance drivers leave the 3Dfx cards behind by 20%, reaching placement no. 2 right behind the cards with NVidia’s RIVA 128 chip. ATI’s Rage Pro also offers a very good 3D image quality, making it the only other chip next to the 3Dfx Voodoo, that would display the city scene of the Final Reality benchmark without any flaws. It’s not quite as perfect as the Voodoo though, because it doesn’t perform a very good looking ‘linear filtering’ as visible in Motoracer.
Now although the XPERT cards are certainly excellent for Direct3D gaming, the professional user will also be very pleased with the very good 2D performance, which is more or less in par with Diamond’s Fire GL 1000 Pro. The only thing you shouldn’t do is expecting a decent OpenGL performance though. ATI’s Rage Pro seems to be the slowest new 3D chip under OpenGL.
A very good 3D paired with a very good 2D performance, the support of 4 and 8 MB onboard RAM, hence the support of up to 1280×1024 3D resolution and last but not least the optional TV output make this card a very good all-round solution, apealing to gamers as well as professionals … as long as you don’t require OpenGL.
If you plan on using the XPERT card in a Socket 7 system, you’ll be pleased to hear that the 3D performance isn’t bad even with slower CPUs, however, the Diamond Stealth and cards with NVidia’s Riva 128 are faster. You’ve got to be careful using an XPERT card as AGP version with a Socket 7 board that uses VIA’s Apollo VP3 chipset, because you’ll face some serious compatibility as well as performance problems. These problems don’t occur if you are using the PCI version with these boards.
3D Image Quality
Motoracer: Blocky road textures, just as the Permedia 2 chip, this ruines the spotless Rage Pro image.
Final Reality: Perfect work, all features shown, no flaws visible.
Canopus Pure3D
The ‘Pure3D’ from Canopus is in the first instance ‘another’ 3D add-on card with 3Dfx’ Voodoo chip. If you take a sencond look though, you’ll find that it’s certainly outstanding against all the other Voodoo cards on the market. First of all it comes with 6 instead of the common 4 MB RAM. These 6 MB are divided into 2 MB for the frame buffer, also only enabling a maximal 3D resolution of 640×480, and 4 MB texture memory, double the amount of its competitors. The larger texture memory makes the card run a lot smoother with games that are using a lot of or large textures, because the textures don’t have to be loaded from disk as often as if you’ve only got 2 MB texture memory.
The second speciality of the Pure3D is the TV/video out function. It enables you to play Quake at high quality and high speed on your television and the beauty of it is that it runs on your monitor simultaneously as well. The TV support form Canopus is indeed pretty unique, it has all feautures for adjusting your TV screen so that the picture looks best and you don’t have to disconnect your monitor for it.
These two features combined with the most successful 3D accelerator chip are reason enough for choosing the Pure3D above all other 3Dfx Voodoo cards. Even the price is very attractive, since it’s even cheaper than the Diamond Monster 3D. However Canopus does not bundle any games with it.
As you know, I’m currently in San Jose and can hence not benchmark the Pure3D right now, but I’ll do so as soon as I’m back from Comdex. However, the Pure3D is one of the few products available on the market that I would recommend ‘blindly’. The performance can only be better than of the other Voodoo cards with only 4 MB RAM.
Canopus Total3D
Canopus’ Total 3D is another card with NVidia’s successful RIVA 128 chip. This chip is currently the fastest Direct3D accelerator, but it also supports TV/video out ,video in and some very sophisticated video scaling features. Although Diamond ,Elsa and now even Asus announced support for at least the TV out feature, all of these companies are having problems with the quality of the TV signal, due to some flickering problems with the RIVA chip. Canopus is the first company that solved this problem, it’s the only company that offers simultaneous monitor and TV output and it supports up to more than 800×600 resolution for the TV out. On top of that the Total 3D is the only RIVA card that also supports a very comfortable video in feature, including picture as well as video capturing with a very sophisticated software.
If you have a look at the Total 3D you’ll find that it’s looking pretty different to the RIVA products of Diamond, Elsa and Asus, who stayed pretty close to the original reference design of NVidia. This is already a good sign for the work Canopus put into the development of their Total 3D card. On this card you’ll find a piggy back card that manages the quality enhancement of the TV out and a Brooktree chip, which does some preparatory work before the video in signal goes into the RIVA 128.
Canopus presented the TV out, video in, video scaling, picture capturing and video capturing feature to me and I was pretty impressed. The features work and the quality is excellent. You don’t need to boot your computer with the TV connected and the monitor disconnected to enable the TV out as you have to with the products of the competitors.
All in all this card seems to to have what it takes to become my number one recommendation for a RIVA 128 card, but you may want to wait until I ran the benchmarks as well. I don’t expect it to be any slower than all the other RIVA 128 cards, but I wonder if it will live up to Diamond’s Viper V330. Maybe the driver is even faster though. However this won’t change the fact that this RIVA card blows away all the other cards in terms of features … this could easily make you able to live with a few 3D Winbench points less than the Viper.
Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro
The Fire GL 1000 Pro was together with ATI’s XPERT cards one of the first AGP cards available. It’s using 3DLabs’ Permedia 2 chip and comes with 8 MB onboard SGRAM. Since its first release the drivers have improved a lot, particularly improving the performance in 3D Winbench 97.
3DLabs are known for their OpenGL accelerating products and the Permedia 2 chip is no exceptionto this rule. It’s the only one of all the currently released new 3D chips that has a really good OpenGL performance, which makes this chip kinda unique. Although the good OpenGL support as well as the very good 2D performance will mainly appeal the professional user, the Direct3D performance of the Fire GL 1000 Pro is pretty impressive, making it the number 3 closely behind cards with NVidia’s RIVA 128 and ATI’s Rage Pro chip. It’s price is lower than a Matrox Millennium II with 8 MB RAM, which makes this card very attractive for any user.
The only real disadvantage of this card is the lack of ‘alpha transparency’ support. This makes e.g. the city scene of Final Reality look really pretty awful. The Permedia 2 chip also doesn’t support ‘fog table’, but this is a feature hardly ever used. As long as games use ‘color key transparency’, you won’t notice the lack of ‘alpha transparency’ either, but even the black smoke in Motoracer is already a hint that games are using this feature.
If you look at price/performance you’ll find out that ATI’s XPERT cards are closest to the Fire GL 1000 Pro. If you want to make a decision between these two unequal felows you’ll have to decide what’s more important to you. Excellent OpenGL support or excellent 3D image quality. For people that use OpenGL applications, the ATI cards won’t be an option. However, the Fire GL 1000 Pro is certainly no good solution for systems with weak CPUs, because then the ATI XPERT as well as the Diamond Stealth II leave it quite a bit behind in 3D Winbench.
All in all is Diamond’s Fire GL 1000 Pro a very attractive high end card, with good Direct3D support, average 3D image quality, great OpenGL performance and very good 2D performance. This is the right card for professional users who like playing games, like e.g. myself. If you can spend the money, why not getting a 3Dfx card as well? This is probably the perfect solution.
3D Image Quality
Motoracer: You can see the blocky road texture, no good linear filtering and dithering.
Final Reality Benchmark: Look at the exhausts of the rockets, there’s a black area around it. This is the missing alpha transparency feature. Note the cross, which looks fine, since the Permedia 2 supports tri-linear filtering. However, also no cloud/fog visible.
Diamond Monster 3D
The Monster 3D from Diamond is nowadays quite a famous card. This is due to the fact that it’s probably the most sold add-on 3D card with 3Dfx Voodoo chip on the market. It shares its features with most of the other 4 MB Voodoo cards, the difference is mainly determined by the games it is sold with and the connector cable, which Diamond lately changed to a very high quality one.
To say it again, this card is used as addition to your existing graphic card, using up another PCI slot ,but don’t worry about IRQs, the Monster 3D doesn’t need one. The card needs to be connected in between your exisiting graphic card and the monitor, using a special cable to connect the output of your normal graphic adapter with the 2D input of the Monster 3D. This procedure is the same as with any other Voodoo card, the only difference is the quality of the connection cable. If it is of low quality, it can degrade the quality of the 2D signal of your 2D graphic adapter. Diamond is lately using a very thick high quality cable.
3D graphic cards with 3Dfx Voodoo chip have pretty much revolutionized the gaming market in the last 12 months, because these cards can display high quality 3D at a pretty high speed. Many games are using the proprietary 3Dfx ‘Glide’-engine to get the most out of the card, but the Direct3D support is excellent as well. Until recently, Voodoo cards were not only the quality, but also the performance leaders in the 3D gaming market and the performance is still pretty competitive. The Voodoo scales pretty clean from low end CPU to high end CPUs, giving even a 6×86 system the power for decent 3D gaming, as well as letting a PII 300 system fly.
One of the theoretical disadvantagesof the Voodoo chip is that it can accelerate 3D only in full screen mode, in a window the 3D application will run as if the Voodoo chip wasn’t even there. However, this chip is made for 3D gaming, and who would play a 3D game in a window anyway? The next disadvantage is the limited 3D screen resolution. The Monster 3D ships with 4 MB onboard RAM, 2 MB for textures and 2 MB frame buffer. In 2 MB frame buffer you can only get a 3D resolution of 640×480 pixels and this is the limit of the Monster 3D as well as most other Voodoo cards. Only cards with more than 2 MB frame buffer can do higher 3D resolutions.
The advantages of the Monster 3D are much shinier than the disadvantages. First you can continue using your 2D graphic adapter, which comes in very handy if you’ve got a high quality 2D card that is crap at 3D, like e.g. the Matrox Millennium I and II. You can use the Monster 3D with any graphic adapter available, regardless if it’s a 3D accelerator already, regardless if it’s an AGP or PCI card. In case you are using it with a (maybe slower) 3D accelerator card, you only will have to tell the games which card or engine you want to use.
The second advantage is the wide support of 3Dfx’s 3D engine. Hardly any games developer would dare not supporting the 3DFx ‘Glide’, and from what you hear, the games developers are pretty pleased with 3Dfx’s engine anyway. This means that if you buy a game, you can count on good picture quality and high 3D performance with Diamond’s Monster 3D. What else can you ask for? Reason number three is the Voodoo’s 3D image quality. So far I still have to see a card that’s supporting all the 3D features that the Voodoo supports. I haven’t seen any game or benchmark yet, which wouldn’t look best on the Monster 3D. The last reason for buying this card could be this special ‘OpenGL’ portation of the ‘Glide’. This doesn’t mean that the 3Dfx Voodoo can do real OpenGL, but it does OpenGL good enough for running some games written for OpenGL, like the famous GLQuake or the newer GLHexen. A Quake player that hasn’t seen GLQuake on the Voodoo chip hasn’t really played Quake. It is almost unreal how much better it looks than the standard version. Quake II will support the Glide in an GL version as well.
All in all the Diamond Monster 3D is still one hell of a 3D gaming card and you can use it in any system.
3D Image Quality
Motoracer: The Monster 3D offers a perfect 3D image.
Final Reality: A perfect image; cross, exhausts and cloud – everything looks fine.
For more information about 3Dfx Voodoo cards go to
Diamond Stealth II S220
Diamonds new low cost card with the name ‘Stealth II’ is supposed to continue the successful days of the ‘Stealth Video’ 2 years ago, before it was replaced by the Matrox Millennium. The Stealth II is using Rendition’s Verite 2100 chip and it will only be available as PCI solution. It’s the cheapest of all the new Diamond display adapters, but that doesn’t mean that its performance is bad.
People ,who can remember products with Rendition’s Verite 1000 chip, know that Rendition can offer a pretty good 3D engine. Although Direct3D wasn’t the strength of the Verite 1000, the special Verite 1000 portation of Quake, called VQuake, could show how powerful the Verite engine really was. The quality of the Verite 1000 was also quite high and certainly competitive to 3Dfx’s Voodoo.
The new Verite 2000 family from Rendition is still using the idea of the Verite 1000 and will deliver a lot of power to applicatins written for this engine, but the Direct3D performance of the new chip family has vastly improved. Even though the drivers of the Stealth II are still in its early stages, it can almost reach the Direct3D performance of the Diamond Monster3D in a Pentium II 300 system. However, used in a weaker socket 7 system, it shows that it’s the number two after the cards with NVidia’s RIVA 128 chip. This makes it very interesting for people that have only weaker systems and who don’t have a huge budget. The 3D quality of the Stealth II is very high, it even supports tri-linear texture filtering.
A look at the 2D performance of the Stealth II shows that business applications are not its strength, and NT users should certainly look at a different graphic card than the Stealth II. Under Windows 95 it’s not that much slower than the former standard card Matrox Millennium, which again shows that a gamer with a small budget may well be interested in this card.
The Stealth II is certainly not the right display adapter for high end freaks, because it’s 2D performance is too poor and the 3D performance is also not able to cut the custard. People who want to go for AGP solutions will also have to choose a different product. However, there’s quite a lot of people with Socket 7 systems out there, who want to play Direct3D games at a high visual quality for low cost. These people should have a close look at the Diamond Stealth II.
The Diamond Stealth II comes with 4 MB SGRAM and cannot be upgraded to more memory.
3D Image Quality
Motoracer: The Diamond Stealth looks fine in Motoracer, no complaints.
Final Reality: Almost perfect image, smooth cross, defined exhausts, but not cloud visible.
Diamond Viper V330
Diamond’s Viper V330 is one of a whole lot of cards that are using NVidia’s new RIVA 128 chip. This chip is currently the fastest 3D chip for Direct3D applications and it offers this high performance for a relatively low price. As most RIVA 128 cards it comes with 4 MB SGRAM which cannot be upgraded.
The RIVA 128 chip is able to do video accelerating and scaling, it has an analog video input and a video output as well. These features were meant to be supported on the Viper, but there won’t be a European PAL version with the video out feature for the next time, due to a flicker problem of the RIVA chip. As far as I know, NTSC versions are shipping, but there may be simular problems.
The Viper V330 is using its own special BIOS and together with the Diamond drivers it’s currently the fastest Direct3D accelerator card available. The fact that the RIVA 128 is using Direct3D as its API makes Direct3D games very fast. Due to the RIVA’s limitation to only 4 MB onboard memory, it can only support 3D up to a resolution of 800×600. However this should be enough for most gamers. I have seen a special version of GLQuake playing on a RIVA 128 card, but I haven’t managed to test this myself yet. Systems with slower CPUs can take advantage of this card as well, it stays on top of the Direct3D performance tests.
Diamond’s drivers managed to enhance the Viper’s 2D performance to pretty impressive values, only under NT and true color the performance drops. Even the OpenGL performance of the Viper is fairly impressive, so that this card can be used under NT without being sluggish at all.
This fastest available Direct3D card is certainly worth a consideration for gamers with or without a 3Dfx card as well as for office users with a smaller budget and Socket 7 systems. You only have to live with a limitation to 800×600 in 3D games and the lack of ‘tri-linear texture filtering’. ‘Fog table’ is currently not supported by the Viper V330, but the latest drivers from NVidia offer this feature already. Hence I’d expect that the next release of the Viper V330 driver will support this feature as well.
3D Image Quality
Good image quality in Motoracer, no complaints.
Final Reality Benchmark: The cross looks blocky, no tri-linear filtering. No cloud visible.
Hercules Dynamite 3D/GL
The new Dynamite 3D/GL is using 3DLabs :Permedia 2 chip, so that shows you where to put the Dynamite 3D/GL, it’s pretty much Hercules’ first professional card for a long while. 3DLabs’ Permedia 2 is known for very good 2D performance, the best OpenGL performance in this price group and a pretty good Direct3D performance as well, although it’s not offering the highest 3D image quality due to some missing features.
I am happy to see a Hercules product with this chip, which in my eyes is one of the best 3D chips currently available, unless you’re a hardcore gamer who doesn’t care for anything else.
Due to the fact that I’ve only received the card here in Fremont, CA, it will take until after Comdex to run tests and benchmarks, but we could expect higher results than with Diamond’s Fire GL 1000 Pro, because the Permedia 2 chip is clocked with 90 MHz or even more against only 83 MHz in case of the Diamond card.
Stay tuned until then.
Hercules Stingray 128/3D
Hercules’ Stingray 128/3D has been totally revamped and is now comingas a one card solution. This is supposed to improve or even eliminate the performance problems of the Voodoo Rush chip from 3Dfx, compared to the Voodoo. The Stingray 128/3D would become very interesting, if this should be the case, because it comes with 8 MB RAM, 4 MB shared frame buffer for the Alliance AT25 and the Voodoo Rush and 4 MB texture memory (28 ns !!!) for the Voodoo Rush alone. This should warrant very good performance as well as a 3D resolution of up to 800×600 against the 640×480 of the normal Voodoo cards, of course as long as the system is fast enough for that.
The Stingray 128/3D also offers an output for stereo glasses as well as a TV out and because it’s a single card solution it’s certainly an interesting candidate.
Hercules Thriller 3D
The Thriller 3D is the only card I haven’t received yet, it’s supposed to happen at Comdex. Nevertheless some background’s available for you already for quite some time and I can add some rumor from within Hercules to it.
The Thriller 3D uses Rendition’s Verite 2200 chip. This chip is supposed to be pretty much the same as the Verite 2100 chip used in Diamond’s Stealth II S220, but it is using a 230 MHz internal RAMDAC instead of only 170 MHz in case of the Stealth II. The card will be offered with 4 as well as with 8 MB of RAM, enabling higher 3D resolution than Diamond’s Stealth II.
Hercules is pretty excited about this card and they expect it to be a fairly fast player in the 3D graphic card market.
Number Nine Revolution 3D
The Revolution 3D from Number Nine is using the ‘Ticket to Ride’ chip, also manufactured by Number Nine. This chip offers high 3D performance, average 3D performance and OpenGL support and hence the card is mainly targeted to the professional market.
The benchmarks in the comparison chart are already several weeks old, so that it is fairly likely that the performance of the Revolution 3D has increased by now. There’s no doubt about that the Revolution 3D is a very good 2D card with a kind of decent OpenGL performance. The expensive T2R chip does not have a RAMDAC included, so that the Revolution 3D is one of the few cards that use an external RAMDAC, which is responsible for a very good image quality.
The price as well as the low Direct3D performance will make the card pretty unattractive for gamers, but if you are a professional user and require excellent image quality, the Revolution 3D might be interesting for you. The card can be upgraded to up to 16 MB onboard WRAM.
I will re-run the benchmarks pretty soon to see if the 3D performance of the Revolution 3D has improved.
3D Windows 95
The lead of NVidia’s RIVA 128 chip in Direct3D is obvious, the first four cards are equiped with this chip. Diamond’s drivers for the Viper V330 seem to be the best ones for this chip. ATI’s Rage Pro chip is a worthy second, not very far behind the NVidia chip.
As soon as the textures get larger than the onboard texture memory, textures have to get transported from main memory. The Monster 3D reaches its limits already at a resolution of 640×480 and is suffering from the slower PCI bus, thus it has the worst result here. The new 3D king NVidia’s RIVA 128 chip wins this test as well, also Diamond’s Viper V330 AGP is the fastest of all.
The Riva 128 is still performing best here as well, although it has only 4 MB local memory. This means that even at this resolution the Riva 128 will have to use main memory for textures, using AGP’s DIME.
The Revolution 3D doesn’t use AGP’s DIME feature in its driver yet, which is the main reason why the performance is so bad in this test. Unfortunately is 1024×768 more than the Riva 128 can support under 3D, because 4 MB aren’t enough for the front, back and z-buffer. This opens the field for ATI’s Rage Pro chip, which clearly wins this test. Even the PCI version of ATI’s Rage Pro is doing impressively well.
NVidia’s RIVA 128 chip wins this benchmark as well, although I am wondering about the significance of this test. For some strange reason the Rendition Verite 2100 chip gets the undeserved last place.
OpenGL Windows NT
OpenGL is not the strength of the competitors of the Fire GL 1000 Pro in this test, the lead is clear. ATI’s Rage Pro loses out completely in OpenGL, although ATI speaks of ‘OpenGL support’ of the Rage Pro. Strange …
The tests were run on the MSI MS6111 motherboard, using a Pentium II at 300 MHz. The NT tests were run from a Seagate Cheetah ST34501W connected to a DPT PM2144UW, the windows 95 tests were run from a Quantum Fireball ST 3.2 UDMA IDE disk.
3D Winbench with Socket 7 CPUs
Running the test with an AMD K6 233 or Pentium MMX 233 shows that things can change quite considerably when using a weaker CPU. Now the Rendition Verite 2100 chip, used in the Diamond Stealth II, shows that its 3D performance hardly scales with CPU performance. This makes it the second fastest chip in 3D for Socket 7 CPUs. It also shows that ATI’s Rage Pro chip has serious driver problems here. Who would have thought that it suddenly would come last in this test?
Tests run on a FIC PA-2012, 64 MB SDRAM, Quantum Fireball ST 3.2.
2D Windows 95, 16 Bit Color Depth
In the typical Business Winstone 97 the Revolution 3D is the clear leader. Diamond’s Viper V330 and ATI’s XPERT cards are fighting for the second place. As you will notice in all the 2D benchmarks, 2D is not the strenth of the Rendition Verite 2100 chip, the Diamond Stealth II performs almost always slowest in 2D.
The good old Millennium can still lead the field when it comes to the Highend Winstone 97 under Windows 95. However all results are within the range of only 2 points, so all cards are doing pretty fine.
2D Windows 95, 32 Bit Color Depth
Under true color the lead of the Revolution 3D is obvious. It’s surprising to see that almost all new cards are faster than the Millennium though, even the ‘gaming cards’ with NVidia’s Riva 128. The ATI cards are holding a worthy second place, significantly ahead of the rest.
True color is something the Number Nine card loves, giving a performance example to all the rest. The Diamond Viper V330 is performing impressively well here, the ATI cards don’t seem to handle workstation graphics under Windows 95 too well at all.
2D Windows NT, 16 Bit color Depth
The new Windows NT drivers of the Fire GL 1000 Pro are doing very well, but ATI’s NT drivers are even better. It is impressive to see how fast the Rage Pro chip is under Windows NT, since it’s currently also the second fastest gaming chip. Number Nine should learn a little bit from these drivers, since the current driver doesn’t seem able to live up to the Windows 95 results. Again Diamond’s Viper V330 is doing very well too, considering it is targeted to the gaming market.
The good OpenGL performance of the Fire GL 1000 Pro is the key to these HighEnd results, here the Riva 128 can’t compete against the other cards. Again ATI shows that it can do very well in a Highend Winstone as well and if you think about it you’ll have to agree that workstation graphics are usually performed under NT rather than Windows 95.
2D Windows NT, 32 Bit color Depth
The Fire GL can show its OpenGL muscles again, but the Revolution 3D leaves also no doubt that it is the right card for true color. NT plus true color is certainly not the field of the Riva 128, but the ATI cards are still doing pretty well in this test. It’s impressive to see that Diamond’s Viper is still faster than the former highend card Matrox Millennium under NT at true color.
And again a clear win for the strong OpenGL support of the Fire GL 1000 Pro, as well as a worthy second placement for the ATI cards, who are even faster than Number Nine’s Revolution 3D.
The tests were run on the MSI MS6111 motherboard, using a Pentium II at 300 MHz. The NT tests were run from a Seagate Cheetah ST34501W connected to a DPT PM2144UW, the windows 95 tests were run from a Quantum Fireball ST 3.2 UDMA IDE disk.
3D Accelerator Feature Comparison
