Who do Voodoo?
Written: Apr 23 '00 (Updated May 10 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Excellent graphics, and smooth transitions
Cons: only 16bit color(but not reallya con)
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| artic00cat's Full Review: 3Dfx Voodoo3 3000 |
3DFX was the pioneers of accelerated 3d graphics cards with the original Voodoo line and followed by the Voodoo2 line, Voodoo3 , and to date the Voodoo4 and 5 line. 3DFX has been and still is amongst the main competitors in after market 3D graphic cards. 3DFX has a reliable name and a solid past. The quality of their products is high and their followers are loyal( myself included).
I was originally running a Diamond Viper 550 with 16mb of video ram on the card. This card produced good stand still graphics , but it choked when trying to play games or run video sequences within a game. The card would produce jerky scrolling and broken up video sequences. However I could not believe it was just the card causing the problems, so I updates the driver to the latest Detonator drivers and tried again with no luck. At this point I was no longer using the Diamond tools or driver packages. I shut down all application besides systray and explorer, my system resources were 85% free, hard drive was optimized, and latest drivers for the games I was playing were also downloaded and installed. Yet I still was experiencing these problems.
A friend of mine introduced me to the Voodoo3 3000 AGP that he was running in his current machine. We placed my system next to his both machines were using the AMD K62 chips and 128mb ram and playing the same game Unreal. The first thing I noticed is that when the intro was running the color on his Voodoo3 although only 16-bit seemed to be more vibrant than that of the Viper 550. Also the Voodoo3 seemed to produce some graphics that the Viper did not. The Voodoo3 ran through the intro smoothly with no interruption's and the Viper was jerky and did not appear to handle it as easily. So I turned the Viper to 16bit as well and this yielded no change. Finally we put my Viper card in his machine, just for accuracy and it did not respond any better than it did in mine. So the next step was to put the Voodoo3 in my machine, this performed exactly as it did on his machine with nice smooth intro. So at this point it appeared that it was indeed the card that made the difference.
So after all this of course I ran out and bought my self my very own Voodoo3 3000 AGP. The card installed easily and the configuration and loading the drivers went without concern. As stated before I booted the machine loaded the drivers , changed the setting in Unreal to reflect the new card and presto I was gaming without worries. This all happened in September of 1999. To this day I still have my Voodoo card , and I simply Love it. I am anxiously awaiting the delivery of my Voodoo5 5500 AGP and at this point have sworn my loyalty to 3DFX. I will personally never again buy another video card that is not a 3DFX.
The moral of this story is that the Voodoo3 3000 AGP is a great card. It will produce beautiful graphics and smooth transitions. The colors are sharp and look good , even in 16bit color. To the naked eye it may be hard for some people to see the difference between 32bit and 16 bit any ways. 32bit puts a little more strain on the video card than 16bit, thus in 16bit you yield more frames per second. This is a good card and for anyone looking to upgrade their video card to buy this card. It is a good performer and runs solid. Anyone who is a gamer will enjoy this card as it enables you to be able to run 3DFx's glide feature and you will have more than enough card to run about any game you want. All standard applications like Windows and Word will run well on this card as well. If you are looking for a new video card, look no further.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
artic00cat
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Location: New York
Reviews written: 100
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