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Voodoo3 F4 Benchmark Comparison
by Bubba "Masterfung" Wolford and Pierre "Papadoc" Legrand
 

Conclusion: Bubba "MasterFung" Wolford

Clearly what we are seeing here is a further development of 3d card prowess. The newest 3dfx offering, Voodoo3, is an excellent accelerator, as demonstrated above.

Our results show that Falcon really is limited by the CPU and RAM. One of the reasons flight sims requirements are different from those of Quake 2 Shogo, is that our games are often very dependant on the CPU and main memory for the majority of the game play.

As has been stated by Gilman Louie on several occasions, at any one time the campaign in Falcon 4 can be calculating over 100,000 objects every second. The demands on the CPU and RAM are enormous! In spite of this, I am very excited from what I see from the Voodoo3 3000. During my brief campaign experience, I have seen my FPS increase into the lower twenties consistently in 2d cockpit. This is an increase from 15-18 FPS running either V2 SLI or my Diamond Viper V550 TNT.

Click to continue

 

As more and more simulations come to the market, we will see simulations mimic those same conditions that Falcon 4.0 simulates on computer hardware.

Obviously, NVidia's new offering should be hitting the market in the coming weeks. Since we have not seen the card yet, and thus cannot make a realistic comparison, I can only tentatively recommend the Voodoo3 series as the best video card board for flight simulations. Once we can get a new Nvidia TNT2 based board then we can evaluate it's capabilities and make a clear recommendation.

One thing we can all agree on is that we have needed a common benchmark for our group and now we have one. It seems that a day does not go by that I do not see someone claim they got an increased "frame" by doing whatever to their system. The only way we can be sure of any increase in FPS is to benchmark. Lets make running benchmarks in our community a necessity and not a privilege.

Join a discussion forum on this proposal by clicking   HERE.

 

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 Last Updated April 12th, 1999

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