Drivers
This is definitely a card with mature drivers. The Voodoo3 chip is shared with the 2000 and 3000 models and those drivers have been revised constantly for the past few months. The experiences learned in STB’s two previous TV cards definitely shines through in how solid the A/V portion’s drivers are. The only major driver bug is one that I have never experienced, the alleged TV-out problem. I have full confidence that this problem will not even be an issue in the near future.
The test configuration was as follows:
3dfx Voodoo3 3500TV 16MB vs. Creative Labs 3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra 32MB
Celeron 366 @ 506MHz (92 x 5.5)
Abit BP6 motherboard
384MB PC100 SDRAM
Sony 5x DVD drive
20.4GB Maxtor ATA/66 7200rpm hard drive
Diamond MX300 Sound Card
Linksys 10/100 NIC
Windows 98
Performance
In Quake 2, the Voodoo3 3500TV rocked. Both the TNT2 Ultra and 3500TV were perfectly playable up until 1600x 1200. At that point that point though both cards began to weaken. I would not recommend playing at 1600x 1200 on either card because the numbers reported here are averages over the timedemo. At some points in the demo the frame rates were significantly lower as I could see a noticeable slowdown. Other times, the frame rate soared, thus helping the average. These are the type numbers you can expect in the current generation of OpenGL games based on the Quake 2 engine.
Q3Test is a great program to use to shed light onto how graphics cards will perform with tomorrow’s games. The (*) next to high quality on the graphs is there to show that all of the normal high quality settings were used except for 32- bit color mode. This is because the 3500TV cannot render 3D scenes with 32- bit color. As you can see in the normal mode, the 3500TV beats out the TNT2 Ultra by a nice margin. When the move is made into the high quality mode it is all over for 3500TV. 39.6fps is still a perfectly respectable score. The TNT2 Ultra, though, takes a comfortable lead as you move to the higher quality mode.
Expendable uses a slew of explosions to test a card's Direct3D performance. In Expendable the 3500TV rocked the TNT2 Ultra. In every test the 3500TV flexed its muscle and took first place honors. It is easy to see why 3dfx has long been known for exceptional raw 3D speed. I should point out that 1600x 1200 was not playable on either card. Also, the TNT2 Ultra is able to run in 32- bit color mode and the 3500TV cannot.
Jobs
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
