Test Setup

In this review the benchmarks were actually not only done to find out a performance champion, but to make sure that all cards fulfil our expectations. The test computer was a Pentium II 400 MHz, 128 MB SDRAM from LGS, Soyo SY-6BA motherboard, Matrox Millennium II AGP 8MB video card and a Quantum Fireball ST 3.2 Ultra-DMA. Operating system was Windows 95 Release 2.1 (with USB supplement) and Microsoft's DirectX 6 final release.

For benchmarking I used the Direct3D game demos of Incoming and Forsaken and the OpenGL based games Quake II (actual version 3.17) and the new demo version of Sin. Sin is based on the same 3D engine as Quake II, but consumes some more performance. All benchmarks ran at 85 Hz refresh rate.

The default chip clock speed of the cards differs: Some work at 90 MHz, others at 92, 93 or even 95 MHz by default. For benchmarking I did not change the default values, since every manufacturer defined the card's maximum.

Voodoo² boards are quite a hot affair in two respects. On the one hand they deliver pretty fine 3D performance, on the other hand the three chips as well as the memory can reach pretty high temperatures. To check that the boards run stable even at higher temperatures, I did not test them in an open system on the desk as usual, but inside a closed ATX midi tower case. Each system was running one hour before I started benchmarking to make sure that there were at least 40 degrees Celsius inside the case.

Oh, by the way: You will see that most screenshots have German elements; the reason is that I am running a German Windows 95 on this hard disk. :-o