The Tech Zone 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 Review

Chipset Features

3D Features

166 MHz clock speed
7 million triangles per second
333 megatexals per second fill rate
100 billion operations per second
128-Bit 3D acceleration
Dual, 32-bit texture rendering architecture
True multi-texturing. 2 textures per-pixel per-clock
Full hardware setup of triangle parameters
Support for multi-triangle strips and fans
Single pass, single-cycle bump mapping
Single pass, single-cycle trilinear MIP-mapping
Sub-pixel and sub-texel correction with 0.4x0.4 resolution
Per-pixel atmospheric fog with programmable fog zones
Floating point Z-buffer (W-buffer)
True per-pixel, LOD MIP mapping with biasing and clamping
Highly accurate LOC calculations
Texture compositing for multi-texture and special effects
Support for 14 texture map formats
8-bit palletized textures with full bilinear filtering
Texture compression through narrow channel YAB format

2D Features

Fully integrated 128-bit VGA and 2D engine
High speed 128-bit Windows GUI acceleration
Hardware acceleration of Bresenham line draw, 2-edge polygon fill, scissor/rectangle clippers and full 256 ROPs
Internal 256-bit datapath
Source and destination chroma-keying for DirectDraw
Color expansion and single-cycle block writes
Accelerated 8, 16, 24, and 32-bit modes

Video Subsystem

Support for ultra-high resolution displays on PC monitors, LCD flat panels, and HDTV
Resolutions up to 2046x1536 at a full 75Hz screen refresh rate
YUV 4:2:2 and YUV 4:2:0 planar support
30 frames per second DVD playback with no dropped frames
Supports the latest MPEG2 software CODECs via DirectShow
De-interlacing using Bob and Weave
Separate gamma correction for video and graphics
Auto page flipping using VBI for smooth motion video
16 MB high-speed SDRAM memory
350 MHz Integrated RAMDAC

The Voodoo 3 3000 is pretty feature pack. The only thing that it's really missing is lack of 32 bit rendering and AGP texturing. For now this isn't really a big problem. However the next wave of 3D games might show that the Voodoo 3 will not be the number 1 choice for gaming anymore. Then again, for $169 you really can't go wrong getting this card. It plays the games out right now and plays them really well. Who cares about what is coming up in 6 month time?

One of the biggest selling points of 3Dfx cards has always been it can run all the 3D games on the market. 3Dfx is the only video card company that can claim this. The Voodoo 3 3000 support Direct 3D, OpenGL and 3Dfx Glide.

While some people say Glide is not important anymore (and for the most part they would be right) there are still games being released that will not support Direct 3D or OpenGL out of the box. Tribes is a good example. If you want to run that game the way it was meant to be run, you needed a Voodoo card because it only runs with 3Dfx Glide. Don't have a Voodoo card? Then you're running it in software mode. Another example is Unreal. Epic does have a Direct 3D patch for the game now but for the longest time it was Glide only. Even to this day, Unreal runs best with 3Dfx cards. As a matter of fact, a Voodoo 3 3000 is the only video that can run Unreal at high resolutions with high frame rates.

Next page: How fast is this thing?