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- who is the winner ? - Published: 11/02/98 |
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3D cards under the microscope... You may wonder which 3D card would better boost those lousy software rendering frame rates in Unreal. The graphic below will try to clarify this for you. It shows the comparison between various 3D accelerator cards and what benefit in terms of frame rate they provide for Unreal. For better comparison, all the tests were done using the HQ settings found in our Xlr8yourMac FPS Toolkit 1.04. When analyzing the results, keep in mind that some cards like the ATI and MacPicasso also have a 2D acceleration feature which could not benefit Unreal here but surely other games or applications that use 2D. New 3D card products are also soon to be release like the banshee series (MacMagic Pro and MP 850) from Villagetronics which sport a voodoo 2 and 2D accelerator on the same card. A consumer oriented 3DFX voodoo 1 called MacMagic should also soon be release. It will be interesting to see how well they perform . If you have one of those, send us your Unreal frame rate results and I will update the graphics. I preordered a MacMagic Pro Banshee card recently from VillageTronic, so as soon as I get it, I will be able to give you a nearly complete overview of the 3D card options available to you (hopefully sometime in December).
 Clearly here, the Voodoo 2 chipset is the overall winner. But keep in mind that you won't see any improvement of running a voodoo2 card in a non-G3 Mac (except with the faster Mach 5 series) over a Voodoo 1 (see our Global comparison graphics). This is because the CPU is the bottleneck in the lower end machines. Even the fastest 604e are simply not able to push enough information to the Voodoo 2 card, resulting in frame rates similar to voodoo1 performance. If you have a G3 Mac or saving for one, the Voodoo 2 solution is a good choice. We will have to see how the new Banshee from Villagetronics perform with Unreal, but from the benchmarks I saw on the Pc side they performed equally. Considering the fact that it is cheaper and that it can do 2D acceleration make them a logical choice if you did not previously invested in a 2D card. With Quake 2 on the PC, the Voodoo Banshee is performing slightly slower than the Voodoo 2 since it can't do multitexturing. But on the Mac so far, no games are taking advantage of this feature. Since the Banshee runs faster (110 Mhz compare to 90 for the Voodoo2) and has faster and larger ammount of memory (16 MB SDRAM vs 12 MB EDO RAM for the Voodoo 2), it will perform like the Voodoo 2 if not maybe slightly better in higher resolutions. [To date Quake 2 is the only game on PC that uses multitexturing (and Unreal, at least on the PC-Mike)] The big losers in those tests were certainly the TwinTurbo and the Ultimate Rez. I did not have G3 benchmarks with those cards but the ones I saw , done on 200 Mhz 604 e were not any better than software rendering. Also a dissapointing performance was obtained with the ATI Rage cards (4 or 6MB) that did not do much better than software rendering either. For these cards, you really need to max the VRAM to 8 MB . The scores obtained with the ATI Rage PRO 8 MB and the Voodoo 1 (the Macpicasso also sports a Voodoo1 chipset) were nearly identical, with the voodoo 1 card having a little advantage over its competitors since it can safely be tweaked to run at higher speed. [from the original 50 Mhz to as much as 60 Mhz , provided that you install a proper cooling fan]. Keep in mind that the ATI Rage Pro 8 MB can also provide 2D acceleration as well as the MacPicasso 540/3DO. But any additionnal benefit has a price: expect to pay an extra 250$ more for these cards compare to a Voodoo 1 and they also can't be tweaked like a simple voodoo 1. If you go for an ATI Rage type card, make sure you add enough VRAM [The current ATI RAGE line, the Xclaim VR, Xclaim 3D and Nexus GA have the same 3D engine but have different features like the ammount of memory on the card]. Finally, don't bother with the ATI Rage II since the results will be nearly the same as software rendering. The currently shipping iMac have an ATI Rage II card built-in. Fortunately the new revision II will have an ATI RAGE PRO 6 MB so Unreal on those machine should perform much better. In conclusion, if money is a factor and you do not need 2D acceleration I would seriously consider getting a Voodoo 1 card. The price of those cards seriously dropped recently and a new voodoo1- video adaptor combo [Griffin Technology adaptorand any PC voodoo1 card] will cost you around 100-120$.[note that the newly annouced MacMagic voodoo 1 is now shiping for 99$ and that includes the adapter cable]. On the other hand, If the best performance possible is what you are looking for, go for a voodoo 2 from Microconversions or better , a Voodoo banshee card from VillageTronic and you will certainly not be disappointed. The following tests are quite interesting and complete the ones above since they were performed on the same machine with two different 3D cards : the ATI Rage Pro 6MB and the Canopus Pure3D LX 6MB. The machine characteristics are as follows: Power Macintosh G3/333  As a the person who sent the benchmarks noted, "Comparing
the Voodoo 1 and Rage Pro numbers on the same machine makes one
thing clear. If you want to get the most out of this game, don't
waste This reader also commented about the IX 3D Ultimate Rez card
: "ix3d Ultimate Rez RAVE: don't bother. There's so many
rendering errors and the performance is so abysmal that it makes
the software render engine look like a Voodoo II card. If people
are dying to try it, you must set NonATI to true but there's
really no way to get acceptable looking images. It's most likely
driver issues rather than hardware issues. Complain to ixMicro." I am now especially looking for benchmarks on G3 equipped with Matrox 3D and Mactell cards. If you have one of these cards, get the xlr8Unreal FPs Toolkit 1.04 [Ignore any warning on unstuffing the fine - for some reason Stuffit reports the file may be corrupt but it's ok] and send us the benchmarks. I am now working on a graphic that will show different 3D cards performance.- Frank More Unreal Performance comparisons are linked on the main Unreal Tips and Tricks page.
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