Am I a Voodoo chile?
Written: May 27 '00 (Updated Feb 09 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: 128bit graphics acceleration, descent rendering
Cons: technology is slightly old, price is a little high
The Bottom Line: Good gaming cards but their number is just about up.
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| Gr8ful's Full Review: 3Dfx Voodoo3 3000 |
The Voodoo3 3000 AGP was one of the first accelerator cards to combine 60 frames per second with a dual 32bit pipeline to give an exceptional gamers video card. This card supports resolutions up to 2046 X 1536. This card also comes with S-Video TV out and Hardware assisted DVD decoding. The Voodoo3 3000 provides 128bit 2D and 3D acceleration, with 16MB of SDRAM, supporting AGP 2x. Unfortunately all these specifications have been outdone by most video card manufacturers now and you can get one of these newer cards for a little more than you would pay for the Voodoo3 3000.
This card is supported by most games on the market and set a standard for 3D acceleration. Many other companies have used the Voodoo chipset on their video cards like, Creative Labs, Diamond, and even ATI. The card does not support 32bit color in games but does support 16bit. Accelerated 32bit color support for games is a standard on most cards today.
Some other important features of this video card are Alpha-Blending, SPSC (single pass, single cycle) Bump and Trilinear MIP-mapping, programmable fog tables and Gouraud shading. It also does sub-pixel and sub-texel correction. It supports MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 playback and has the patented single-pass multi-textured 3D rendering.
Being one of the first high end AGP accelerators it has been surpassed as the best but it is still a very good card for any home computer and makes a great gift for any gamer needing a good accelerator. The price of this card, however, has not dropped much since it's introduction over a year ago and for a few dollars more you could get a better card.
I recommend this card for gamers who are looking for a good video accelerator card and want to save a some money from the cutting edge cards available today.
Update: 01/05/01
In December of 2000 NVIDIA bought 3dfx and all Voodoo video cards were removed from the retail market. All support has been dropped for these cards by 3dfx and NVIDIA is not providing support, drivers or updates either. The demise of 3dfx is summed up in a review by Vicwang and can be found at the following location.
http://www.epinions.com/cmd-review-56CB-3A0510B2-3A1AC749-prod6
Note: This review by Vic was written in advance of the sale of 3dfx and was updated on 12/15/00 and has many addresses where you can find more information on the demise of 3dfx.
At this time I can no longer recommend buying a 3dfx video card (providing you can even find one). They have been removed from retail shelves but you can still purchase them on the internet. My advice is to stay away from all 3dfx products as you will have no support.
Update: 01/21/01
Earlier this week the 3dfx Voodoo series of video cards appeared back on the shelves at many retail outlets across the nation. The reason for this is that NVidia has announced that they will continue to support the Voodoo line of products until February of 2001. This is great if you already purchased a 3dfx product but is by no means a reason to run out and buy a Voodoo3 3000 or Voodoo5 5500. Remember, this is only a short time of support and unless you plan to buy another upgrade in a year you may want to just forget about the 3dfx cards altogether.
Thanks for reading.
Gr8ful :-)
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): N/A
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