3dfx Voodoo3

The Banshee was a high point in the history of 3dfx's card evolution, as it was the first 3dfx chipset to be designed for use in an AGP slot. Although Quantum3D manufactured AGP Voodoo2 cards, there wasn't another company out there that did the same. The Banshee however was more popular in its AGP form, and the reason is plain and simple, as well as a little unfortunate, the Banshee sole purpose for being available in an AGP interface was to jump on the AGP marketing bandwagon and increase sales. The same people that would walk into a store and feel intimidated by all of the video card boxes on the shelves, are most likely the same people that would opt for an AGP accelerator because that is the current buzz word and we absolutely must have an AGP accelerator to be up to date with our computer hardware. The Banshee is the only AGP video chipset out of its circle of competing "friends" such as the TNT and the G200, that doesn't take advantage of the AGP specification, making it even clearer to the public that the Banshee's sole purpose for being available in an AGP compliant part was to increase sales. Including the Voodoo3, 3dfx has never manufactured a video chipset that supports a technology known as AGP texturing, which is the ability to store/retrieve textures in system memory via the AGP bus. This technology allows for textures larger than the amount of available local graphics memory to be stored and retrieved without an incredible performance penalty, and it is this technology that 3dfx still doesn't support, even with their latest Voodoo3 parts. With more and more games using larger textures, the performance on 3dfx-based cards will begin to degrade, however currently, there are very few entertaining titles out there that will show an incredible performance improvement using AGP texturing due to texture sizes. Times will change, and you can expect the next wave of games to use much larger textures than we're already used to, so if you're buying for the future, you're definitely not going to be buying 3dfx anytime soon.

• 143MHz - 183MHz 128-bit 2D/3D core
• 143 - 183 Megapixels per second
• 286 - 366 Megatexels per second peak fill rate
• 6 Million - 8 Million polygons per second peak processing power
• Resolution support up to 2046 x 1536
• PCI/AGP Support - No AGP Texturing Support
• 16-bit 3D Rendering Support - No 32-bit 3D Rendering Support
• 300MHz - 350MHz Integrated RAMDAC
• 16MB SDRAM
• Optional NTSC S-Video Out (3000/3500 Models Only)
• Optional LCDfx Digital Flat Panel Output (3500 Model Only)
• Direct3D/OpenGL/Glide API Support
• Per pixel perspective correct texture mapping
• 16/24-bit Z buffer
• Support for 8-bit palletized textures