Voodoo 3 3000 Benchmark

Since the Voodoo 3 3000 is a high end card, I tested it on a high end system. The system the Voodoo 3 3000 was tested on was a Pentium III-450 at 450 and 580Mhz. It had the following equipment:

• Intel PIII at 450 and 580Mhz

• Abit BX6 v2 Motherboard

• In Win 24" ATX Case With 250 Watts PS

• 128 Megs PC-125 SDRAM

• Acer 40X CD Rom

• Seagate Medalist Pro 6.5 Gig 7200RPM Hard Drive

• Sound Blaster Live Value

• Acer PCI Network card

• Acer 40X CD ROM

I used Quake 2, Unreal and 3D Mark 99 Max as the benchmarks. All tests were run 3 times and the average score is shown. All drivers were the latest ones from the manufacturers. The Voodoo 3 3000 was tested at it's rate 166 Mhz clock  speed. I also included benchmarks from the card running at an amazing 190 Mhz. Vsync was turned off. No tweaks or special cfg files were used. 3D Mark 99 Max was ran at 800x600, 16 bit color, 16 bit Z-Buffer, Triple Frame Buffer.

Pentium III 450 Results

There is no doubt that this is one fast video card. The numbers speaks for themselves. Clocking the card to 190Mhz increase speed all around. The 190Mhz benchmarks gives us a good idea of how fast the Voodoo 3 3500 will be when it ships. I put a big 60x25mm fan on the card's heatsink to do the overclocking test. This fan came off a VEK20 heatsink. The sucker (or should I say blower?) move over 20 cubic feet of air per minute over the heatsink. At 190Mhz, it's rock stable. It'll even run at 200Mhz but I get some visual artifacts at that speed. The only down side to this  is that you will lose 2 PCI slots.

Pentium III 580 Results

The Voodoo 3 3000 scales very well as the CPU speed is increased. These numbers are so fast they're scary. 61.8fps at 1024x768 Unreal is truly unreal! Both Quake 2 and Unreal are playable at 1600x1200! That was the resolution I ran during my last LAN party. At this high resolution, you see your enemy long before he can see you. They don't know what hit them! :-)

The visual quality of the Voodoo 3 3000 is very good. Much better than a Voodoo 2, but not as good as a TNT/TNT2. The only time I miss the lack of 32 bit support is when playing Quake 3. This is the only game where I see quite a difference in visual quality between the Voodoo 3 and the TNT2. The Voodoo 3 makes up for this by being very fast.

Quake 3 is quite playable at 1024x768 with max texture detail. The first set of Q3 drivers for the Voodoo 3 play the game very fast, but the visuals were well behind what a TNT/TNT2 can do. 3Dfx released a new Q3 drivers a few days later that fixes allot of the visual problem. I would now put the visual quality of the Voodoo 3 ahead of the TNT at 16 bit but behind it when the TNT is running 32 bit.

Next Page: The Verdict