3D Accelerator Card REVIEW
Creative Labs 3D Blaster Voodoo2
Voodoo2 Falls Short in the Rush to Ship

When 3Dfx announced Voodoo2 last fall, it started a horse race among many graphics card manufacturers to be first to market. It fact, the jockeying for position got so feverish that a Diamond employee in Europe gave an early prototype board to a popular Internet hardware site, angering 3Dfx when it happened. Late in January, Creative Labs announced it would ship its first Voodoo2 boards on February 20. This left lots of knowledgeable people scratching their heads, as even 3Dfx's own developer reference boards were barely ramping up at the time.

Users who got the product discovered in the oversized box a 12MB Voodoo2 board, based on 3Dfx's reference design, a pass-through cable, and a driver CD. No bundle and no documentation to speak of were included. Still, these early boards were targeted toward hard-core 3D gamers who wanted to up the ante in 3D performance.

We put the Creative Labs board through its paces and talked to other users as well. We found lots of things to like about this board but also a few disturbing issues.

First, the good stuff. This is a fast board in most benchmarks and game tests. We ran the board in both a 333MHz Pentium II (Deschutes) system and a representative 166Mhz Pentium MMX system. For comparison's sake, we also ran a Canopus Pure3D 3Dfx board through the same suite of tests. We turned off vsync in the drivers for the testing, so the monitor's refresh rate didn't become a factor. Some interesting conclusions came out of our testing.

The Voodoo2 board is a superb hardware engine for Quake II. Even on the Pentium 166MMX, we got over 30fps in the timedemo tests. Gameplay seemed fairly fluid, too, even in heavy action.

Because Voodoo2 now supports trilinear MIP-mapping and has full triangle setup, it screams through the 3D Winbench 98 tests. Some 3D Winbench tests have extremely high triangle counts, something that can slow down a board without a good setup engine. The full set of features helps, too, as most of the 3D Winbench scenes now run hardware accelerated.

The one game with a pure GLIDE driver we tested, Turok, ran very well and looked quite good. However, the difference between the two cards - Voodoo and Voodoo2 - on the Pentium 166 was pretty small, around 5fps. But the difference on the Pentium II was huge. Clearly, the Voodoo board is fill-rate limited on a high-performance CPU, whereas Voodoo2 is CPU limited.

The Direct3D drivers need some work. The differences between Voodoo2 and Voodoo in our Direct3D games, which aren't as feature-rich as 3D Winbench, were fairly small. In fact, the Canopus board actually beat the Voodoo2 board in a couple of cases.

Now, the bad news. Compatibility isn't robust yet. A number of games don't work, though in some cases, it's a matter of old drivers being present in the game directory. Still, F-22ADF's GLIDE implementation fails (but Direct3D, ironically, works). JSF also fails, as does Flying Corps Gold, Wing Commander: Prophecy, FA-18 Korea, and a number of EA Sports games. All these issues are being addressed, but it's clear evidence that the card was rushed out the door without being fully tested. (It's weird that many of the games having problems are flight sims).

In addition, some of the lucky few who obtained two boards are having some problems running them in the much-vaunted SLI (dual board) mode. Again, Creative is working hard to address the issues. We laud Creative's Dylan Rhodes in his near-Herculean efforts to address most of the issues in very public forums, but it's too bad the board and the drivers couldn't have been "cooked" a little longer.

Finally, there's no game bundle. Creative has justified this omission by stating publicly that most games people would want to play they already own, so a bundle would be superfluous. While this may be true for most hard-core gamers, this is a product that will appear on retail shelves. We suspect the real reason was Creative's desire to be first to market.

If you're at all into the Quake engine games, you owe it to yourself to check this board out. It's particularly fast on a Pentium II, even if you're not planning on running in SLI (twin-board) mode. For those who are either into flight simulators or playing lots of Direct3D games, you might want to hold off until the product becomes a little more solid and the game developers who have problem products get a chance to fix them.

By Loyd Case

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