The Voodoo 3 is a very inexpensive card. You can pick up a Voodoo3 3000 for a little more than $100. Of course, it is not a top of the line card. Other cards in the same generation as the Voodoo 3, such as the TNT2 Ultra and the GeForce 256 simply perform better. Also, new top of the line 3d cards are about to be released, such as the Voodoo 5 line or the GeForce 2.

The Voodoo 3 does make up for these shortcomings with PCI support. All systems that have a Pentium 2 or a newer chip have an AGP bus, which provides speeds up to 4 times faster than an PCI bus. Those of us with aging pentium systems must make do with PCI cards. The Voodoo 3 3000 is the only thing that is keeping my old Pentium 200 as a viable gaming machine.

The only other competing cards with PCI support are the Voodoo 2 and the Riva TNT. The Voodoo 3 performs better than both of these cards. I was able to sustain 30 frames a second playing Quake 2 on my Pentium 200. Simpler areas rendered at speeds around 80 frames a second. The Voodoo 3 will also provide acceptable performance for Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament, however it only supports 16-bit color. These two games (and most likely future games) support 32-bit color. The visual quality won't be as great as the newer cards.

Another possible concern is that the Voodoo 3 has only 16 MB of video ram. Most cards now provide 32 MB of ram, and in the future, some games might have large textures that won't fit into the Voodoo 3's 16 megs.

3dfx has opened the specifications to the Voodoo 3, and has even wrote drivers for the Linux operating system. It is a blessing to see a company provide support for alternate operating systems. Unfortunately, the Linux drivers lag behind the Windows drivers in terms of performance. This could change with a release of a production driver for the XFree86 4.0 graphics server.

3dfx provides great support on their website. I discovered a bug with the latest drivers for the card, and I was given a response on 3dfxgamers.com by a 3dfx employee in less than an hour. I was given a workaround and was told that it would be looked into immediately.

The Bottom line: If you do not have support for an AGP card and you wish to have a 3d accelerator, this is the card to get. The most demanding games are still playable on a two or three year old system with it.

Update: Please read the comments about this opinion for some information I overlooked. Thanks, tag_1234!




Recommended: Yes