Conclusion

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3D Chip Advantages Disadvantages
3Dfx Voodoo Banshee Glide support No compatibility issues Good 3D performance, better than Voodoo2 in games that don't use multi-texturing Only current 2D/3D solution with K6-2 Quake 2 support Missing 2nd TMU compared to Voodoo2, thus worse Quake 2 performance No upgradeability to SLI Average 3D image quality No AGP support, thus inability to run games that use very large textures
Matrox MGA-G200 Good 2D engine Best 2D picture quality Excellent 3D image quality Satisfying 3D performance for owners of fast Pentium II systems Good AGP 2x support, able to run games with large textures at good speed Lowest 3D performance of the 3D chips in this test Only D3D wrapper for quake 2 and Sin available, ICD not released yet No K6-2 Quake 2 support No Glide support
NVIDIA RIVA TNT Best 2D engine Excellent 3D performance with fast PII CPUs, either close or even faster than a single Voodoo2 board Excellent 3D image quality Excellent AGP performance OpenGL ICD support Serious performance drop with slower CPUs, probably no good solution for Socket7 systems Serious chip clock issue, most boards will for now ship with slower chips than what I've tested. Only 80 to 90 MHz possible because of chip yield problems No convincing K6-2 support as yet No Glide support Chip gets very hot
S3 Savage3D High 3D performance in benchmarks Fast 2D engine Performance gain through texture compression Cannot run Sin Demo properly Transparency problem and missing crosshair in Quake 2 Worst 3D image quality of the 3 tested chips Odd lines flickering on screen whilst running Winstone 98 Possible discrepancy between benchmark results and actual game play No K6-2 Quake 2 support No Glide support

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