Brian Hook, bwh@idsoftware.com, http://www.idsoftware.com doh! I'm a dork. Forgot to mention that it was with Q3TEST1.DM3. Well, the benchmarks are in. First off, I want to note that I didn't test with anything overclocked, since I'm here to tell you "how it is" out of the box, not "how it is" after you download 14 different guides on how to turn everything up so your computer is just like one of John's cars: fast, when it's working. I'm also beta testing with pre-production boards from anyone -- I have a Matrox G400 and a Savage4, but these are pre-production boards and I'm not entirely confident that numbers generated from them would be valid. Tests were done in two modes: 640x480 and 1280x1024. The former stresses driver performance, the latter should stress hardware performance. When possible the tests were run at 16 and 32-bit. For some reason, the desktop resolution made a difference (probably the desktop was consuming memory that the driver couldn't free), so to make things "fair" we ran the game at the same color depth as the desktop. Options were set to the defaults ("normal"). Test machine was an Intel PIII/500 w/ 128MB of RAM. Sound was disabled. We want to run the tests on an AMD K7, but our test unit has some reliability problems. Drivers were pulled directly from either 3Dfx's Web site or from GLSETUP.EXE, depending on which was necessary for the adapter. Adapter Res FPS Comment 3Dfx Voodoo3 3000 640x480x16bpp 51.6 NVidia RivaTNT2 640x480x16bpp 48.4 3Dfx Voodoo2 640x480x16bpp 46.9 NVidia RivaTNT 640x480x16bpp 46.6 ATI Rage128 640x480x16bpp 46.2 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee 640x480x16bpp 37.6 NVidia Riva128 640x480x16bpp 31.0 S3 Savage3D 640x480x16bpp 25.7 S3 Savage3D 640x480x16bpp 25.6 r_picmip 0 Intel i740 640x480x16bpp 25.0 Matrox G200 640x480x16bpp 23.1 ATI Rage Pro 640x480x16bpp 20.1 3Dfx Voodoo 1 640x480x16bpp 16.8 r_picmip 2 Rendition V2200 640x480x16bpp 15.9 NVidia RivaTNT2 640x480x32bpp 46.5 Nvidia RivaTNT 640x480x32bpp 40.8 ATI Rage128 640x480x32bpp 40.6 Matrox G200 640x480x32bpp 23.1 S3 Savage3D 640x480x32bpp 16.4 3Dfx Voodoo3 640x480x32bpp N/A 32-bit rendering not supported 3Dfx Voodoo2 640x480x32bpp N/A 32-bit rendering not supported 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee 640x480x32bpp N/A 32-bit rendering not supported 3Dfx Voodoo 1 640x480x32bpp N/A 32-bit rendering not supported NVidia Riva128 640x480x32bpp N/A 32-bit rendering not supported Intel i740 640x480x32bpp N/A 32-bit rendering not supported ATI Rage Pro 640x480x32bpp N/A 32-bit rendering not supported Rendition V2200 640x480x32bpp N/A didn't bother running the test 3Dfx Voodoo3 1280x1024x16bpp 23.1 NVidia RivaTNT2 1280x1024x16bpp 21.7 ATI Rage128 1280x1024x16bpp 18.1 NVidia RivaTNT 1280x1024x16bpp 15.7 Voodoo Banshee 1280x1024x16bpp 11.9 Matrox G200 1280x1024x16bpp 8.5 S3 Savage3D 1280x1024x16bpp 6.9 3Dfx Voodoo2 1280x1024x16bpp N/A not enough framebuffer RAM NVidia Riva 128 1280x1024x16bpp N/A not enough framebuffer RAM ATI Rage Pro 1280x1024x16bpp N/A not enough framebuffer RAM 3Dfx Voodoo 1 1280x1024x16bpp N/A not enough framebuffer RAM Rendition V2200 1280x1024x16bpp N/A not enough framebuffer RAM NVidia RivaTNT2 1280x1024x32bpp 13.1 ATI Rage128 1280x1024x32bpp 13.0 NVidia RivaTNT 1280x1024x32bpp 8.2 Matrox G200 1280x1024x32bpp 6.1 Specific Comments: 3Dfx Voodoo 3 3000: Very very fast. Damn shame about that 16-bit thing. I fear the 3500. 3Dfx Voodoo 2: Still holds its own after all these years. A lot of that is because we actually leverage the hell out of its multitexturing capability. Honestly, if you have a V2 and you're happy at 640x480, I don't see a compelling reason to upgrade to something newer just for Q3TEST (unless you REALLY want to spend your money). 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee: Wow, not bad at ALL. Faster than a Riva128 and it looks better too. Sure, there aren't many around, and I know a lot of Banshee users out there feel like they've been orphaned (to which I say "Hey, at least you didn't buy a Voodoo Rush"), so hopefully these scores will perk you up. 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics: No, it's not even competitive, but this was a Monster 3D (4MB _total_), and it ran pretty well. Well enough that I think it's quite playable. When turning down the lodbias and subdivisions and switching to 512x384 it could post numbers > 20fps. A good card if you're on a budget and a friend is willing to give you one. Then again, being plugged into a PIII/500 didn't hurt either. :-) ATI Rage128: Good general purpose accelerator, right on par with a RivaTNT in most cases. ATI Rage Pro: Let's be frank: it's not exactly an elite graphics accelerator. However, there are more Rage Pros out there then there are atoms in the universe, so we need to make sure we run on them and run with reasonable performance. I'm generally happy with ATI's OpenGL driver performance and quality. I don't think we can really polish this one much more. Intel i740: Hey, for $49, it works, and it doesn't look that bad. It has reasonable frame rate, it's robust as hell, and in general it just works. If you need an accelerator and only have $50 to spend this is the one to get. It has around 60Mpixels/second fill rate, and the Banshee has around 90Mpixels/second fill rate. Banshee is about 50% faster, so it looks like both drivers are doing the best they can given the backend they're working with. Matrox G200: Decent board, but its drivers could use some tweaking since in theory it has performance on a par with a Banshee (~90 mpixels/second). Nice image quality and it has been reasonably solid for us (it locks up the machine about once or twice a day). NVidia Riva TNT2: This was on an Elsa Erazor III, so I think it's just a regular TNT2, not an Ultra. Um, it's real fast, I think that's about all I can really say. NVidia Riva TNT: Still a very fast accelerator, even if it's being phased out by newer chips like the TNT2. For < $100, it can't be beat. Seriously, if you have < $100 and you need to upgrade, there is NO reason you shouldn't get a TNT board from Creative (I hear that on pricewatch etc. that you can find them for $75). NVidia Riva128: Fairly fast, but damn is it ugly. We tested with a 4MB one, so that may be a factor in its performance. I wish we had a Riva128ZX, but we're all out here and CompUSA didn't have any. Oh well. And when I say "is it ugly", I am not talking about a subtle thing. It is really, REALLY ugly, and the drivers we were running were causing all kinds of grotesque things to happen. However, we've run with a ZX before with nary a hitch, so that may have been a side effect of using a non-ZX Riva128. S3 Savage3D: I have a feeling that the Savage3D isn't really getting a fair shake here because its driver really need some work. If I get up to date drivers, I'll let everyone know. One nice thing about the Savage3D is that with its texture compression you can run at "r_picmip 0" with very little performance loss. Rendition V2200: *sigh* It could have been a contender. GENERAL COMMENTS: We can run on just about anything, and we're pretty happy about that. It's obvious that driver redistribution is going to be an issue, but we will eventually have that solved (in time for our retail release) so that hopefully people won't be returning Quake3 just because they can't get it to run. If I had $50 to spend on an AGP accelerator, it would be a generic Intel i740 board (e.g. Jaton). If I had $100 to spend on an AGP accelerator, it would be a Creative Graphics Blaster TNT board. If I had $150 to spend on an accelerator, I'd probably go with a TNT2. If I had an unlimited budget, I'd probably either go with a 32MB TNT2 Ultra or, if I REALLY didn't give a damn about 32-bit rendering or Glide games (modulo the Creative Glide wrapper, which I have no comment on at this time), then I'd definitely opt for the V3 3500 when it comes out. I'll eventually test a G400, Permedia3, and Savage4 and post those results, although in all likelihood I'll have to redo all the tests to remain valid. Now that we have an "intern" (Eric Webb, who did all this benchmarking for us here) of sorts on board I plan on doing more benchmarking (well, actually I plan on having HIM do more benchmarking, heh) since we'll have the bandwidth for that sort of thing. Numbers on a K6-3 and PII/450 may be forthcoming if we have the time. Great, now I get to look forward to bug reports AND hate mail. Rock out.