Super7 Video Accelerator Comparison - Part 1: High End Gaming Solutions (June 99)

A very important consideration when pursuing one of the hottest 3D accelerators on the market for your Super7 system is the quality and stability of that card's drivers. Until recently, 3dfx had been the only strong supporter of 3DNow! in their drivers, however now that Matrox, NVIDIA, and S3 have either announced or are boasting both SSE and 3DNow! compliance the focus shifts to the quality and stability of the drivers that are being provided.

The first issue is whether or not the particular chipset manufacturer has a working OpenGL ICD (Installable Client Driver). All of the compared manufacturers, 3dfx, 3DLabs, Matrox, NVIDIA, and S3 all have "functional" OpenGL ICDs for their products. While they aren't complete or optimized for performance just yet, this means that all of the cards featured here can run Quake 3 (a question which quite a few people probably wanted answered long ago) ;)

Unfortunately, not all of these manufacturers have quality OpenGL ICDs for their products. In the case of 3dfx, a beta OpenGL ICD was made available to the public just prior to the release of idSoftware's Quake3 Arena test to allow for compatibility (and to cut down on the amount of hate mail to 3dfx tech support for not supporting Q3A). This beta ICD provides for performance in OpenGL games at anywhere from 50 - 85% of the performance of the 3dfx MiniGL, which is essentially a small driver intended to be used for a few games in particular, not a fully functional OpenGL ICD. For this reason, AnandTech benchmarked with both the current OpenGL ICD and the MiniGL drivers to show current performance of 3dfx products in both cases. Once the OpenGL ICD is optimized, the performance of 3dfx products should be back up to close to the levels of the MiniGL drivers, however until then, you'll be playing Quake3 Arena at speeds slower than the TNT2 Ultra (it's a fact, accept it ;) ). Once the OpenGL ICD is complete, things will most likely change, and the Voodoo3 will grow much more competitive in arenas where the MiniGL cannot be used and the OpenGL ICD must stand on its own.

The current Voodoo3 OpenGL ICD is only available under Windows 9x, meaning that professional users by day/gamers by night won't want a Voodoo3 for some heavy 3DStudio Max rendering under Windows NT4. In AnandTech's tests, the beta OpenGL ICD seemed to have stability problems running at 1600 x 1200

On the opposite end of things, 3DLabs has the most complete and optimized OpenGL ICD for their Permedia3 out of the manufacturers compared here, unfortunate poor gaming performance will keep the Permedia3 out of the hands of most Super7 users. NVIDIA probably has the next best OpenGL ICD out of the bunch, second to only 3DLabs. Their OpenGL ICD is solid, stable, and has been improved and maturing since the days of the original TNT.  The same can't be said about the latest detonator 1.88 drivers, during AnandTech's tests, the detonator 1.88 drivers with the TNT2 crashed more than all of the other cards combined.  NVIDIA has some serious issues to work out with the 1.88 drivers before the majority of Super7 users can begin using them without getting frustrated.  There are a number of unofficial releases available online that claim to fix these problems, so you may want to take a look at those if you're interested, at your own risk of course.

In the middle of it all are Matrox and S3, S3's OpenGL ICD for the Savage4 could use some performance tweaking as well as the Matrox G400 OpenGL ICD. Both OpenGL ICDs seem to only support 16-bit Z-buffering in OpenGL applications/games, this is often times a trick implemented to provide the illusion of a relatively nonexistent performance drop when going from 16-bit to 32-bit color. NVIDIA's OpenGL ICD on the other hand does enable 32-bit Z-buffering (24-bit Z + 8-bit stencil) by default, and therefore exhibits a larger performance drop when moving from 16 to 32-bit color.

32-bit Z-buffering is noticeable once you move into the 32-bit color arena, so be sure that when you're comparing performance benchmarks in 32-bit color you know the Z-buffer depths before jumping to any conclusions. The G400 and Savage4 both exhibited problems at 1600 x 1200 x 32-bit color, both seemingly driver related.