Posted: February 1, 2000
Written by: Greg Heasley

3dfx continues its Voodoo3 series with another flavor of the popular Voodoo3 chipset, the Voodoo3 3000 PCI. Why PCI, you might ask? Why not? Not everyone has an AGP slot, after all. Instead of throwing the 3000 PCI into a PIII 600 or Athlon 750, we decided to put it into an older system for this review. How does a Pentium (p5) 200 MHz sound? This is a likely system to use a Voodoo3 3000 PCI with, so we thought it'd be perfect.

Specifications

3D Features

166 MHz clock speed
166 MHz Memory Speed
16MB of 6ns SDRAM
7 million triangles per second
333 megatexels per second fill rate
128-Bit 3D acceleration
Dual, 32-bit texture rendering architecture
True multi-texturing: 2 textures per-pixel per-clock
Full hardware setup of triangle parameters
Support for multi-triangle strips and fans
Single pass, single-cycle bump mapping
Single pass, single-cycle trilinear MIP-mapping
Sub-pixel and sub-texel correction with 0.4x0.4 resolution
Per-pixel atmospheric fog with programmable fog zones
Floating point Z-buffer (W-buffer)
True per-pixel, LOD MIP mapping with biasing and clamping
Highly accurate LOC calculations
Texture compositing for multi-texture and special effects
Support for 14 texture map formats
8-bit palletized textures with full bilinear filtering
Texture compression through narrow channel YAB format

2D Features

Fully integrated 128-bit VGA and 2D engine
High speed 128-bit Windows GUI acceleration
Hardware acceleration of Bresenham line draw, 2-edge polygon fill, scissor/rectangle clippers and full 256 ROPs
Internal 256-bit datapath
Source and destination chroma-keying for DirectDraw
Color expansion and single-cycle block writes
Accelerated 8, 16, 24, and 32-bit modes

Video Subsystem

Support for ultra-high resolution displays on PC monitors, LCD flat panels, and HDTV
Resolutions up to 2046x1536 at a full 75Hz screen refresh rate
YUV 4:2:2 and YUV 4:2:0 planar support
30 frames per second DVD playback with no dropped frames
Supports the latest MPEG2 software CODECs via DirectShow
De-interlacing using Bob and Weave
Separate gamma correction for video and graphics
Auto page flipping using VBI for smooth motion video
16 MB high-speed SDRAM memory
350 MHz Integrated RAMDAC

The Voodoo3 3000 PCI sports the same features as its AGP brethren, except it lacks TV-Out. The card is fast, with a 333 megatexel per second fill rate and a 166 MHz clock speed -- all on the old PCI bus. Even though the Voodoo3 is fast, it does lack some important features, such as large texture support and 32-bit rendering. This has become a major problem, that I'm sure you are all very aware of. The 2D features and image quality remain on the same level as the other Voodoo3 boards, which is for the most part, great.

Why PCI?

Why PCI? Simple. Some people don't have an AGP slot. People with older computers usually don't have one, and some newer PCs don't even have them. Many people that have a 'store bought' or 'name brand' PC end up with onboard ATi Rage chipsets or worse. And with Intel's new i810 and i820 chipsets that also use onboard video many more people with a possibly very fast system are stuck with substandard graphics cards. This is where 3dfx's PCI Voodoo3s come into play. It gives you an option that you normally can't forsee. Plus, the AGP Voodoo3s don't really take advantage of the AGP buses extra bandwidth, so you're not losing much by going the PCI route. The Voodoo3 3000 PCI also makes a very good temporary card. If you want to wait for the next generation of cards before forking out $250+, the V3 is a great option. The only other competitive cards available in PCI versions are TNT and Voodoo2 based cards. Since these are both quite old, the Voodoo3 3000 PCI has a large market to dominate.

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