Thursday - 16th of April 1998 - Hilbert Hagedoorn

Don't you love it when a UPS bus is driving towards your home & delivers a huge box at your house ? Somehow i always feel like a child unwrapping a present. Today they brought me the OEM version of the Monster 3D II from DiamondMM. As we all know it should be fastest 3D card arround. (At this time ofcourse) A year from now i'll be probably be reviewing the Voodoo3 or Banshee card based upon the rapid market of technology.

I've decided to skip most 'allround' benchmark in this review, yes Winbench '98 will not be used anymore. Lately there is a new trend hitting the streets, manufacturers are 'optimising' there drivers especialy for programs like WinBench ect. The best method of determining wether a card is fast 'to my humble opinion' is by examining framerates in games & 'feeling' how the game is running.

Read this little information that i found on Toms hardware-page wich confirms my expectations on Winbench '98 :

You may have wondered why I never used 3D Winbench 98 for my 3D accelerator reviews. I found out pretty soon after 3D Winbench 98 was released, that the results scored in this benchmark did not show any conformity with frame rates scored in any real world 3D game. It also seemed pretty strange to me that some graphics card manufacturers were keen on equipping me with new drivers right after 3D Winbench 98 was available, sometimes even with the words 'these drivers will perform better in 3D Winbench 98'. Comments like that don't really enforce your believe in that benchmark, it rather sounds pretty much as if these new drivers were simply improved for this particular benchmark. Now whilst suspecting something like that I couldn't really be bothered doing any research about this unpleasant issue. Instead of this I started concentrating on finding new and good 3D games that included some decent frame counters. 'Turok' was one of the first, now the awesome game 'Incoming' and the latest playable demo version of the impressively looking 'Forsaken' as well as 'Quake II' complete my 3D benchmark suite for the time being. It was actually pretty annoying that I often had to explain to graphics card manufacturers why I wouldn't use 3D Winbench, because some were particularly keen on me using this benchmark. Others suggested Final Reality and although I really liked that benchmark when it was new, I really went off it latest since I saw the amusing posting of Mercury, where a Voodoo Rush card scored higher than a Voodoo2 card in Final Reality. I'd rather call that 'Final Irreality'.

Now lets start the review.

Installation

Installation of the Voodoo 2 card is very simple, ofcourse if you've own(ed) a Voodoo1 make sure that you de-install it. Also make sure that you remove all Voodoo(1) information from your registry. (if you don't know what i'm talking about then please forget it & don't fool arround the the registry). After inserting your Voodoo2 card into an empty PCI slot you can reboot your system. As soon as windows starts it will begin its plug & pray sequence. An unknown device will be found & you have to direct/browse windows to the drivers directory on the Cd-Rom. Very easy installation indeed. After this proces of installing make sure that you install DirectX 5.0 (can be found on the Diamond CD) & then you are set to go ...

Bundled Games

The retail version of the Monster II comes with a bundled pack of demo's & games :

Heavy Gear (Full Version) - by Activision
Jedi Knight - Dark Forces II
Shadows of the Empire: Battle of Hoth
X-wing vs Tie Fighter: The Academy
TombRaider II - Special Edition - by Eidos Interactive (3 levels)
And the following demos: Final Fantasy, Daikatana, Joint Strike Fighter, and Flight Unlimited II by Eidos Interactive

I think its disapointing to see that almost all games are playable levels. Only one game is a full version ' Heavy Gear' Wich has been fully optimised for Voodoo2.

Differences Between the M3D 2 and the CL 3D Blaster V2

The Diamond Monster 3D II, and the Creative Labs 3D Blaster Voodoo2, are almost 100% identical when it comes to board layout. Very few of the components are different, and they are all in the very same locations. Ofcourse the the boards have been 'copied' to the upmost precision from 3Dfx's reference board. Thats why all voodoo2 board will look alike, only slightly differences in components will make very little difference. So if you want to buy a Voodoo2 card, go for the best price vs softwarepack. The hardware isn't the problem anymore, its almost all the same.

Reference guide

Well, since i received an OEM version of the Monster II Diamond didn't include a manual. Pretty DUMB as i may say. Diamonds lack for support is getting cheaper and worse every single time they bring out a product. If you want to read the manual then you can find an acrobat-document on the Driverdisk. OEM or Retail i expect at least some sort of manual printed on paper with at leat the basics of installing the card. Shame on you Diamond.

Software compatibility

While releasing the Voodoo2 chipset 3Dfx promised that voodoo2 would be backwards compatible with Voodoo1. Well, not entirely true as i may say, i've tested the following games on compatability  :

                                   3Dfx Reference Drivers                 Diamond Drivers
Battle Zone                               +                                                 +
Formula 1 '97                            -                                                 -
F22 ADF (DiD)                         +                                                  -
Incoming                                   +                                                 +
Longbow 2                                +                                                 +
PowerBoat                                +                                                  -
Quake II                                    +                                                 +
Screamer II                                -                                                  -

As you can see, quite a lot of games are not working. In general you have better chance in getting a game to run with the Reference drivers from 3Dfx then diamonds own drivers. As far as diamonds drivers go, i know that they are working on new & improved drivers wich should arrive somewhere soon.
However game compatability is not 99% !  A lot of software houses are currently working on Voodoo 2 patches for there games, that should say enough about compatability i guess ... At least its good to see that game-companies are supporting Voodoo2 without a thinking even twice.

Tv-out

A major flaw to my humble opinion is the missing TV-Out in the current Voodoo2 boards. The Voodoo2 chipset has been built to support such a feature, i know for a fact that the 3D Wizard From CG will support this option. Personally i think that all 3D boards should have at least a composite &/or sVHS output. Playing your favorite on the big screen really give gameplay another dimention. But in the during the battle between Creative & diamond they probably overlooked this option or from a profit look at thinks they didn't wanted to invest in such an option.

Overclocking & performance in general

 

Overclocking is a trend that we've all known & use since the first steps of Voodoo ... Diamond's monster II even has overclocking capabilities in its driver software. (with a slider you can choose your clockspeed) however, overclocking really isn't a necessety anymore. Only if you own a really HIGH-end pentium II (350 Mhz for example) overclocking will become interesting. Why, well it a bad case of the bottleneck problem. Your processor cannot proces anymore data upto a certain level. To put it in a simple words, your voodoo2 card is processing geometric data faster then your processor can handle. 

Look at it this way, blow 10 liter of oxygene thru a straw, now blow that same ammount thru a gardenhose of the same length, much easier eh ? You can compare the straw with a <233 Processor & the gardenhose with a >266 II processor.
In the case of the Voodoo2 you will require at least a Pentium II 266 to start seeing a significant difference in frame rate between Voodoo1 & Voodoo2 , in case of two boards in SLI configuration a Pentium II 333 isn't even fast enough showing a frame rate difference between 640x480 and 800x600. This shows that the frame rate could be a lot higher at 640x480 if the Voodoo2 would get enough data from the CPU. 800x600 and more is occupying the Voodoo2 more, so the time of waiting for the CPU is less.

* tested on a Chaintech 200MMX TX Chipset + 64Mb SD-Ram + 9 Gig Ultra DMA HD's

The benchmarks are based upon this system * So you can't exactly notice the 'promised' 2-3 times faster Voodoo2 Eh ?

Copyright 1999 - All rights reserved Hilbert Hagedoorn