A third part of a 3dfx Voodoo series is going to be about Voodoo 2, obviously. This card is quite special, it holds many chuffed memories for me, mostly of games.
Brief history
Let’s kick off with a brief history. After the Voodoo Rush turned out to be a major disaster for 3dfx, they needed to come out with something special, something that would blow everything else out of the water or at least out of the competition. And the Voodoo 2 was supposed to be exactly that. It was released in the first quarter of 1998 and there were couple of improvements over the original Voodoo Graphics. After the Rush disaster, 3dfx didn’t want to take any chances and made the Voodoo 2 3D accelerator only card as was the Voodoo 1. While the Voodoo 1 board had two chips, one pixel pipeline chip and one for textures, the Voodoo 2 had thee, one pixel pipeline chip and two for textures clocked at 90MHz compared to 50MHz on the Voodoo 1. Memory was also increased, the Voodoo 1 used 2MB for pixel chip and 2MB for textures, the Voodoo 2 used 4MB for pixels and 2-4MB per chip for textures, depending on if you’ve got 8MB or 12MB board.
According to an old 3dfx website the Voodoo 2’s fill rate was twice as fast than that of the Voodoo Graphics which was 45Mpixels/sec vs 90Mpixels/sec and triangles per second were three times as fast at 3 million.
At the end of 1997, 3dfx announced they plan to use AGP interface for the upcoming Voodoo 2 cards, however, all Voodoo 2 cards had only PCI connector in the end, so I reckon they must’ve hit some sort of problem, either financial or performance-wise. When the voodoo 2 was finally released it cost about $230 for 8MB version and $300 for 12MB version depending what company you wanted the card from. And as with the Voodoo 1, 3dfx wasn’t selling the cards, they were just selling chips as an OEM provider to companies like Diamond or Creative and they were the ones setting the final price.
It supports all possible 3D features of that era. Perhaps the most astounding feature the Voodoo 2 introduced was an SLI technology which allowed to use two cards in one PC. Now let me tell you a little story of mine. It was the end of 1998 when I bought two brand new Diamond Monster 3D IIs. I was on my way home with my new treasure, riding the tube. I was so thrilled I couldn’t wait till I get home, so I had to unbox the cards right on the tube to check out the boards and read the entire manual at least four times. When I got home, I immediately took the cards out of the bags, slammed them into PCI slots, and realised, the bloody boxes didn’t contain SLI cables. I was gutted. First, I called to some computer shops in the area and asked if they’ve got an SLI cable, but the answer was either “what is an SLI cable” or “we don’t have it”. I’ve noticed the SLI connector looks very much like a ribbon cable for 3.5” floppy drive. I yanked out a cable from my floppy drive and tried fitting the cable into the connector, it was a perfect fit, I was dead chuffed. System found both cards, I installed the drivers, but after the restart, it didn’t work. I was gutted again. So, I whipped out latest magazines and started “googling”. I found some ad that was showing the Voodoo 2 with an SLI cable, when I took a closer look I noticed, some wires are inverted. Yeah, my mood swings that day were off the charts. So, I took the cable out, cut it and disassembled the connector, flipped the wires according to the picture in the ad and reassembled the connector. Then I connected the cards together and turned my rig on. It started up and nothing blew up, so far so good. Windows booted up, I wasn’t even breathing, clicked on the Voodoo tab in the properties and that was my happiest moment of that day, maybe even happier than playing the games later. Now back to the SLI.
SLI stands for scan line interleave. And it basically does what it says it does. For those who don’t know what a scan line is, it’s a single horizontal line of pixels on your monitor. And the SLI uses one card to render even lines and the second card to render odd lines, which then makes a complete picture, it’s so simple, yet so powerful. If I remember correctly, games were pretty much twice as fast with SLI setup, which we’ll see in a minute if it’s true or not. And not only that, since it used two cards, it used the memory of both cards simultaneously, so you could set higher resolution in games up to 1024×768.
Test setup
Now to the tests. I’ve used the most powerful contemporary consumer CPU for the tests, which was Pentium II 450MHz, motherboard with Intel BX chipset, of course, 512MB of RAM and Windows 98. Vsync disabled and I’ve kept all frequencies at default settings across the board. What I also wanted to know if more CPU power could help the Voodoo 2 run faster. So, I tried Pentium III 700MHz and 1200MHz. Using the 700MHz CPU increased the frame rate quite significantly, but 1200MHz didn’t have much of an impact any further.
I’ve got three Voodoo 2 cards. Diamond Monster 3D II with 8MB of RAM and two A-Trend cards with 12MB of RAM and I was wondering if there’s any noticeable difference between 8 and 12MB. More memory would suggest you can set higher resolution in games, but it’s not true, both cards can work only up to 800×600. So, what about performance? Well, in all games I’ve tested, the results were practically the same, maybe couple of tenths of FPS, which nobody can even notice. I tried latest reference drivers 3.02.02 first, games running under Glide and OpenGL worked perfectly fine but Direct3D games crashed every time I tried to run them. So, I then tried to use drivers 3.01.01, and everything worked like a charm. Official Diamond drivers allowed the card to be overclocked. It wasn’t anything to write home about, you could increase the clock speed up to 95MHz. Interestingly, right after I installed the drivers, the card was overclocked to 92MHz. The difference in performance between 90MHz and 95MHz was about 2%. Naturally, I wanted to know how the Voodoo 2 performs against some of the other graphics cards of that era, namely the original Voodoo Graphics, Riva TNT, S3 Savage 3D and Ati Rage Pro Turbo.
Tests – APIs
As well as the Voodoo Graphics, the Voodoo 2 supported Direct3D, OpenGL and of course in-house developed Glide. In short, any game you threw at it under Windows worked.
Tests – DOS
Before I started comparing the other cards, I wanted to try some games under DOS. The Voodoo 2 worked fine almost in all games. Well, the games that support it either natively or with some sort of patch. I had problems only with Screamer 2, it locked up my rig every time I ran the game, I just couldn’t make it work. Other than that, it worked perfectly using SLI or not.
Tests – Voodoo Graphics
Let’s start with the Voodoo 1 vs the Voodoo 2. To find out how much faster the Voodoo 2 is, I ran couple of games in 640×480, that’s a cap for the 4MB Voodoo 1 which I’ve got. Turok behaves quite strangely. First, I tried running the benchmark with Diamond Monster, so I naturally selected the Monster from the driver list. Then I ran the same test with the single Voodoo 2 and then the two Voodoo 2s. Since I used non-Diamond Voodoo 2s for the test, I chose generic 3dfx driver here, but I noticed the SLI setup has no impact on the performance compared to the single Voodoo 2, so I went back and tried to set Turok to Monster driver again and voilà, it fixed it. The Voodoo 2 is a lot faster, and the gap widened even more with more powerful CPU, while the Voodoo 2’s performance increased even more, the Voodoo Graphics’ performance stayed pretty much the same. Well, that’s not entirely true, some games were actually a bit slower with 700MHz CPU.
Voodoo Graphics vs Voodoo 2
Test – Ati Rage Pro Turbo
Rage Pro Turbo was simply rubbish. The card was unusable for gaming, sure, you could run pretty much every game, but the performance was atrocious.
Ati Rage Pro Turbo vs Voodoo 2
Tests – S3 Savage 3D
S3 Savage 3D was much better choice, but it still couldn’t outperform or even match the Voodoo 2. It was quite good for a low end card, lots of games were actually playable in 800×600 and some even in 1024×768.
S3 Savage vs Voodoo 2
Tests – Riva TNT
Riva TNT was advertised as a Voodoo 2 slayer, but was it, really? It wasn’t unmitigated disaster, it was much better card than the rest of the competition, and in some rare instances even better than a single Voodoo 2, but generally a worse card then a single Voodoo 2 and much worse than Voodoo 2 using SLI setup. The card I’ve got for this test is Diamond Viper V550, naturally I wanted to use Diamond drivers, unfortunately they turned out to be a lot slower than nvidia’s reference drivers and I tried three of them, 4.11, 4.12 and 4.14. I had some problems with the latest drivers 4.14. On one hand these drivers were definitely fastest in OpenGL games, and by a large margin, on the other hand the games were simply unplayable, they were flickering like crazy. In the end, I ended up using 4.12 for Direct3D games and 4.11 for OpenGL.
Riva TNT vs Voodoo 2
Tests – Riva TNT 2
Seeing the Riva TNT not being the promised Voodoo 2 slayer, I decided to go a little bit further and try one last card, Riva TNT2. The problems with the drivers were exactly the same, but what about the performance?
Riva TNT2 vs Voodoo 2
Conclusion
The Voodoo 2 was the ultimate 3D video card of that era, there was nothing better for quite some time. Not only it was the fastest card in the single setup, adding another card to the equation made even newer cards such as the TNT2 run for their money. In the last video, I sort of trashed the Voodoo Graphics’ graphics being ugly, the Voodoo 2 did a little bit better job, but unfortunately not as good as other cards. Still, it was only a minor drawback, if it weren’t for that, the Voodoo 2 would’ve been perfect. The original Voodoo set the standard quite high, but the Voodoo 2 left it in the dust begging for scraps.
