The Head to Head Shootout between two Top Guns in 3D Video Cards...Voodoo 3-3500 vs Voodoo 2x2 Sli.

Recently a little bird dropped off plain white box on my front door that contained a Voodoo 3-3500 AGP. The note from my benefactor stated that he wanted to encourage my work with the Falcon 4 Benchmarks and he hoped that this would help…<VBG>. The note went on to say that this pre-production card was stable at 205 mhz and that he would appreciate it if I didn’t melt it from overclocking the card since it was his personal card. It had been given to him in appreciation of work performed at 3dfx. So in this preview I did not alter the clock speed of 205mhz.

Of course to handle up on the ADD type personalities I will say up front I loved this card and really didn't want to send it back. The wifey looked at the results and shrugged and started sharpening her knife in case I have idea's. But as I told her this brand new Hansol 900p 19" monitor needs a friend...hehehe. For the rest of you I just wanted to show the benchmarks and let you make up your own mind. I just wish I had a 600mhz processor since thru this whole test I had the feeling that the card was loafing, waiting for the CPU to send something to display.

Now my expertise is certainly not in the realm of 3d card technology and I knew that to pretend to be a wizard would only expose my ignorance. So I have taken a different tack and have played to my strong points. I do like tweaking and part of that is benchmarking to see if the tweaking has had some beneficial affect. So when given the chance to preview the V3 I decided to do a H2H competition between my original setup of Twin Voodoo 2’s vs the Voodoo 3 3500 by running benchmarks in Falcon and other games that offer some method of deriving frames per second. My criteria was the benchmark had to be consistent meaning that if none of the parameters had changed that the FPS would be within a few tenths. Game benchmarks mean so much more than the artificial marks so often used. But for those infatuated with synthetic marks I present a full comparison of both cards using 3d Mark 99 at the end of this article.

• Falcon 4 Benchmark

• Flanker 2 Alpha Benchmark

• World War 2 Fighters Benchmark

• Grand Prix Legends Benchmark

• Unreal Benchmark

• Shogo Benchmark

• Quake 2 Benchmarks

• 3D Mark 99 Benchmark

Finally keep in mind that because each machine is different I decided to not include any scores other than scores achieved with my own machine. My machine is a :

Abit BH-6 kg Bios Celeron 366 128k cache
Clocked 83x5.5=458mhz 128mb CA-2 Ram
Voodoo 2 Sli clocked to 100mhz
IBM Deskstar HDWin98 Direct X 6.1

For this test I formatted the Hardrive and reinstalled the operating system cleanly installing the Voodooo3. The cards were run with the "Don't sync buffer swaps to monitor refresh option" selected, though most the tests I have come up with are extremely hardcore and you wont see fast framerates in them.

The goal was to highlight the differences in video cards instead of the differences in machines. So keep in mind that I don't deny that machines faster than mine exist. But I believe this to be a good example of what a current Voodoo 2 Sli owner can expect by upgrading to the Voodoo 3-3500.

So without further ado lets move on to the benchmarks.

Falcon 4 Benchmarks

First up is the Falcon 4 benchmark made so wonderful by the –log command producing a excel file that shows frame rates in various forms at different stations while running a mission. These stations provide information regarding average frames, max frames, lowest frames and other items that I haven’t figured out yet. This makes it a simple matter to derive the Frames Per Second in the mission. For complete instructions and the files needed to run this benchmark please visit the Falcon 4 Benchmark page.

Flanker 2.0 Alpha Benchmarks


Flanker 2.0 by SSI is one of the most hotly awaited new sims. The graphics promise and do bring flight sims into the future with newly developed methods of displaying satellite imagery for use as textures. When playing at full detail, the graphic enhancements promise to make this sim one of the most demanding sims as far as hardware is concerned . I am lucky enough to be on the Beta Test squad and I designed a mission that is an extreme test of the power of a particular combination of CPU and 3D Graphics Card. Please keep in mind that this is an Alpha and as such is in NO WAY indicative of the framerates to be expected in the final release. But I thought it would be interesting to see what the Voodoo 3 can do.

This is presented with the permission of Mindscape who also gave me permission to disclose my status as a Beta Tester.

World War 2 Fighters Benchmark

Now onto the World War 2 Fighters benchmark. I hoped that this sim would provide a way of benchmarking it since the graphics are so intense. So I tested it first to see if a method could be found that would satisfy my desire for a consistent rate from test to test. Gladly it wasnt hard at all to produce the desired results. What I did was create a single mission that has alot of airplanes in front of you within viewing distance along with several large groups of moving ground troops. I tested it on my Voodoo 2 Sli and found that by bringing up the Frame rate counter then shutting down the mission and selecting refly, I could then pause the sim as soon I dropped into the cockpit. Then I would wait for the frame rates to drop to a consistent level and mark that as the frames per second.

Grand Prix Legends Benchmark

Grand Prix Legends is by far my favorite Racing sim. For a card to catch my fancy it absolutely had to be brilliant in this sim. Unfortunately there were some issues when running the Voodoo 3 in GPL. When selecting a resolution higher than 800x600 the textures were corrupted. There is currently a workaround but it caused the menu box to become a small part of the upper left of my monitor. Usable but not pretty. The in-sim graphics though are TERRIFIC....<VBG>

But after implementing the workaround be prepared to be floored....this sim is a full 32% faster at 1024x768 resolution. And at a mind-blowing 1600x1200 its still faster than the Voodoo 2 at 1024x768. Absolutely awesome.

Unreal Benchmarks

Unreal is one of my favorite First Person Shooters and still the standard in my opinion for Sheer Graphic Glory. In the newest patch version 224 the time demo function is easy to use and leaves no room for dummies. Always good when I’m playing with it…<VBG> The Graphic improvements in the Voodoo 3 were obvious running Unreal....which makes a beautiful game even more so.

Shogo Benchmarks

Shogo Mobile Armor division was waaay too short for such a fun game. As you may know its strictly a Direct 3D game so this was a good test of that ability. To pick up instructions and the file go to this address and say thanks. http://www.voodooextreme.com/reverend/

Quake 2 Timedemo Benchmarks

Quake 2 still one Mother of a fun game to play and absolutely the best benchmark made today since it requires so little input from the user. Hard to screw this up….<VBG> I also include these to show how fast my machine is….makes it easy for you to compare my results to your machine since this bench is so common. I used the demo's from 3 Fingers site to really put the hurt to these cards.

On to the 3D Mark 99 Benchmarks