January 14- January 21

Voodoo 3 3000 PCI by Alessandro Cancian Games, games, and games. Did you take a look at the shelves in computer stores lately? Try it. The world of computer games has grown and become an unbelievable source of business, even to the point of competing against console games, such as those for the Sony Playstation or the Sega Dreamcast. The quality level of todays games has improved a lot and brought ever-increasing hardware requirements. More RAM memory, larger hard disks, Internet connection and so on are nowadays taken for granted when a new game is purchased. One of the most important factors is the video card. In the past few weeks I had a chance to test one of the latest models of 3dfx, famous for its Voodoo chips. Installing the Voodoo 3 3000 PCI on my PC was a breeze, and so was installing the card driver software. Voodoo 3 3000 is a card that offers both 3D and 2D graphics acceleration, and some acceleration! I dont want to bore you with frame rates and the like; suffice it to say that the 3D acceleration in games like Tomb Raider III or Unreal was very very good. Game fluidity and small detail visualization were fascinating. The Voodoo 3 3000, equipped with 16 MB RAM, offers video resolutions up to 2046 by 1536 pixels (provided your screen can support them). Personally I managed to get a maximum resolution of 1600 by 1200 pixels. The very good 3D acceleration did not, however, correspond to a 2D acceleration; and improvements in business applications were noticeable but not impressive. The suggested retail price for the Voodoo 3 3000 PCI is of about $180 (US), and considering the results this makes for a very interesting price/performance ratio. But my curiousity did not stop there. I also tested the card on my G3 with ATI card, in order to verify all the buzz from 3dfx about the Mac world. Installation was somewhat more complicated since I needed to install a bit of compatible firmware, but everything went smoothly. Currently 3dfx does not support officially Apples platform, at least not for this type of card. Anyway, the drivers you need are available and can be downloaded from the company site(beta version). Performance was clearly better than my ATI card, but not as good as those I had obtained on my PC. The future looks good, since the future Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5 will have good marketing and also full support for Apple machines. My personal advice: if you want to have a unique experience while playing your favourite game, install a 3dfx card; if you want to go a little bit further, instead of Voodoo 3 3000 you could try the 3500 model, with TV tuner. Who knows? In between two games you could squeeze in an episode of Friends& To get more info, visit http://www.3dfx.com

 

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