By Andrey Vorobiev

This chip is presented by 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 16 MBytes, AGP videocard.

Features:

• 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 chip, clock rate lowered down to 125 MHz, 128-bit engine;
• 16 MBytes SDRAM memory in eight Hyundai 5,5 ns microchips, clock rate lowered down to 125 MHz, 128-bit bus;
• Peak speed of scene drawing in multitexturing mode is 125 megapixels/sec and 250 megatexels/sec.

Wasn't overclocked due to elder videocard present.

For the 20th of September'2001 the latest drivers versions from OmegaDrive is 1.02a and from Iceman is beta8.

x-3dfx 1.07.95 drivers were said to support anti-aliasing, but that turned out to be fiction.

To all appearances there will not be any drivers support from ex-3dfx from now on. This verifies the moral death of the whole Voodoo3/4/5 line. The analysis of tweaked drivers from various enthusiasts has shown the absense of anything new, except for just few.

As the drivers differences are equal for all Voodoo3 cards, there's no sense in comparing drivers separately for each of these cards. See 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 section for more information about drivers.

You can compare screenshots taken on this card with reference ones taken on NVIDIA GeForce3.

Games / Cards	1	2	3	4	5	6
3dfx Voodoo3
NVIDIA GeForce3

 

Games / Cards	7	8	9	10	11	12
3dfx Voodoo3
NVIDIA GeForce3

 

Games / Cards	13	14	15	16	17	18
3dfx Voodoo3						-
NVIDIA GeForce3

 

Games / Cards	19	20	21	22	23	24
3dfx Voodoo3	-	-		-
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	25	26
3dfx Voodoo3
NVIDIA GeForce3

Game list:

• 1. Quake3
• 2. Unreal
• 3. Unreal Tournament
• 4. No One Lives Forever
• 5. Serious Sam
• 6. Colin McRAE Rally2
• 7. American McGee's Alice
• 8. Mercedes Benz Truck Racing
• 9. Sacrifice
• 10. F.A.K.K. 2
• 11. Need For Speed V (Porshe 2000)
• 12. Real MYST
• 13. Blade of Darkness
• 14. Giants
• 15. 3DMark2001: Game1
• 16. 3DMark2001: Game2
• 17. 3DMark2001: Game3
• 18. 3DMark2001: Game4
• 19. 3DMark2001: Dot3
• 20. 3DMark2001: EMBM
• 21. 3DMark2001: Vertex Shaders
• 22. 3DMark2001: Pixel Shaders
• 23. Black & White
• 24. Undying
• 25. Anachronox
• 26. Max Payne

Colin McRAE Rally2 works good only with drivers older than 1.07.00 from 3dfx and with drivers from x-3dfx.

I want to note that there's a hidden feature in 1.07.00 drivers concerning HSR (Hidden Surface Remove) technology that deletes some hidden surfaces in the game to free the GPU, but as there's no hardware support for this feature, this is done by the drivers and CPU.

However, HSR is ineffective. This feature isn't working on Voodoo3 cards with 1.07.00. But it works after installation of the latest drivers, though with the same problems as on Voodoo4/5. Read about it in the corresponding article about Voodoo5.

2D quality of this card is good enough in 1024x768 and even in 1280x1024. But there are some speed problems in 1600x1200 resolution.