Voodoo3 or TNT2....what to do what to do?????

[Harley]

Ok first off I'll start with My machine.Amd 400 mhz k62-3d Now @100 mhz bus
128 megs sdram-pc100(2- 64 meg sticks),@100mhz bus
17"(16" veiwable) Optiquest monitor
12.7 gig Quantum hard drive/udma33
16 meg Agp Viper TNT V550 video card
VIA MVP3 AGPset chipset

I had a voodoo2, but not really long enough to really test it on games and compatability, but I did test the games for like looks and such. I now have a Viper TNT V550. I like the tnt better over all, and it doesn't rely on the minigl or glide drivers as much as the V3 or Voodoo's and bahsee's do.
I do seem to have a little more problems with the TNT haveing glitches and errors though. I've upgraded all my drivers wich include New Agp support and irq steering drivers, newest drivers for the video card, newest drivers/patches for the games.
I've been told hat Voodoo seems to work better with Amd's, but then I've been told that TNT works just as well on both PII's and Amd's.
The games I played are: Quake,Quake2,Half-Life, and Need for Speed III. I get the errors in NFS III, and was just online playing Team fortress, and got a Glquake.exe error, wich I never really got with the Banshee I had. I can only compare the TNT to the Banshee i had as I didn't have the V3 long enough, but to test graphics. I do miss the V3 speed it was hauling major ****!!!.

I don't really want to get rid of the TNT V550 I have now, but if this errors stuff keeps up, I'll have no choice BU to get rid of it. I've called Diamond tech support and they can't help me any furher. They say it's left up to hardware conflicts, but I have taken My system to bare mainboard and video, and still get the lockups. Mainboard is a tekram super socket 7 board. I never had these lockups with my banshee so I know it can't be hardware realted.
To buy a voodoo3 or keep the TNT and wait for TNT2 to come out thyen get it?.....what to do!!!?????
Please help, if you can.

Steve

[RobRich]

With an AMD cpu (Super7) the best choice for now is the Voodoo3 AGP. 3dfx uses a propritary AGP interface that does not use system memory for additional texture storage. This is a plus, because it leads to fewer system errors and hangs, mainly impart to the fact that most Super7 chipsets are not fully optimized for the AGP texturing interface. Since 3dfx doesn't use this, you will have a more stable and reliable system. nVidia's TNT-2 video chipset uses AGP texturing, whcih leads to more system problems on Super7 m/b's, like those your current TNT card has. 3dfx also builds the complete Windows Graphical Driver interface into the cards hardware, not software like others. This means that it is faster in 2d graphics than any current card on the market today. As for 3d, TNT-2 does win due to its support for 32mb of mem, 32 bit rendering, and 8 bit stencil buffer. It also employ larger textures, whereas the v3 is limited to smaller, less quality, texturing. 3dfx chipsets use less raw cpu power than TNT based ones. The v3 utilizes less floating point calculations than the TNT-2 for the same operation, mainly impart to highly optimized onboard hardware, and complete support for the AMD 3dnow! instruction set. nVidia drivers have limited support for 3dnow!, but AMD directly influences 3dfx's driver reference models. With all this said, my advice: If you own an Intel system (esp. pII or pIII) go for a TNT-2 based video card. For the rest, get the Voodoo3, you may sacrifice a little 3d image quality, but the improved stability and faster 2d is worth it.

[This message has been edited by RobRich (edited 04-13-99).]

[Leo V]

RobRich,
I agree with what you said about Voodoo3 being very useful for AMD processors, but I think that Voodoo3 can also do very well for PII/PIII systems as well. It is certainly faster (even the slowest, V3 2000, which i've heard overclocks to 166MHz-175MHz, and costs only $105). Read the post I've mentioned from the other thread--Voodoo3's propriatary 16-bit "22-bit" output filter indeed DOES make its image quality practically indiscernable from TNT2's 32-BIT output (the latter coming at a substantial performance cost). Games using alpha blending and extreme (>2x) multitexturing may show a difference, but actually Voodoo3 is way up there even in terms of image quality.

(It was detrimental to 3dfx that the early testers either encountered a bug in the drivers that disabled the magical color filter, or they mistakenly "grabbed" the snapshots directly from the framebuffer, instead of using HyperSnap which captures the snapshot you'd actually see on the monitor. The 3dfx's image quality is much better than these early reviewers let on.)

--Leo V.

[Leo V]

Check this latest comparison:
http://www.gamersdepot.com/rev_v3_tnt2_1.htm

Also you may want to read my reply under a recent thread in this forum, called RIVA TNT2 VS VOODOO3, I summarized most of the issues.
--Leo V

[RobRich]

Talking about o/c'ing a Voodoo3, APK posted over at 3dfiles.com that he currently has his Voodoo3 2000 up to 183 mhz with added cooling, and it's stable. he also has a new revision of his overclocking software coming out soon with direct support for the V3. Some have even tried up to 200 mhz with some success, but only with extreme cooling.