I have nothing bad to say about them personally - my first real 3D accelerator was a Voodoo Banshee. The main issue with them is that the 3D part is a stripped down Voodoo 2 (missing one of the texture units), so the card didn't perform as well as a standard Voodoo 2 did. Having built in 2D and not needing a passthrough cable was nice though.

It's more related to the Voodoo Graphics than the Voodoo2. It was pretty much a Voodoo Rush done right (and with lots more memory to boot, so there's a less texture thrashing advantage over the voodoo2 at least). The V3 built upon the Banshee, and V4 / V5 are part of the same lineage.

Banshee's not terrible. It just doesn't make the more fanatic of the 3dfx fans overconfident over the lower clock and not-yet-implemented multitexturing dismissing it as "the uber shit grafik !!! Get VooDoo 2" not grasping the context for its existence whle revising history to overstate its alleged obsolence. It's a fair budget/OEM card and i'd rather much have it over a Rage Pro, Vantas and any S3 Trio3Ds...

They were stupid (me included). The Banshee is a great Voodoo 2 class hardware. Single texturing vs higher clockspeed was a fine compromise, it is a wonderful gpu for K6-2/P2 class hardware.

leileilol wrote:

Banshee's not terrible. It just doesn't make the more fanatic of the 3dfx fans overconfident over the lower clock and not-yet-implemented multitexturing dismissing it as "the uber shit grafik !!! Get VooDoo 2" not grasping the context for its existence whle revising history to overstate its alleged obsolence. It's a fair budget/OEM card and i'd rather much have it over a Rage Pro, Vantas and any S3 Trio3Ds...

Well said as usual. However, Banshee had higher clock. Vantas were good deal as well ...

Not "Voodoo3 high" though because judging Banshee after the fact is the popular thing to do. 😐

for me it came too soon after I finally had a V2 and it didn't feel like a significant bump, so I'd rather waited... (and waited and waited and finally got a V5)

Dominus wrote:

for me it came too soon after I finally had a V2 and it didn't feel like a significant bump, so I'd rather waited... (and waited and waited and finally got a V5)

It was never an upgrade path to the Voodoo2 anyway, it was meant to be a budget card for Slot-1 gamers; it competed with the TNT and was a better deal in almost every way.

I like my banshee, it is the only working 3dfx card I now have, cost me next to nothing (I exchanged it for two chocolate bars 😊 ) and yeah it is a PCI version from Creative. Crisp 2D picture, good compatibility, working glide. No need to hassle with more cards and cables, takes up less space in an AT case = perfect combination for my socket7 setup.

appiah4 wrote:

It was never an updgrade path to the Voodoo2 anyway, it was meant to be a budget card for Slot-1 gamers; it competed with the TNT and was a better deal in almost every way.

I agree 100%. But maybe there were gamers that had a V2 and they "upgraded" to Banshee, only to see that it was slower in some games. Back then there wasn't so easy to find reviews, on the "internet" you could find only a few places that reviewed hardware, plus that not a lot of people had easy access to the internet. Printed magazines was another way, but they weren't so reliable, a lot they would get paid to write favorable reviews about products.

So I guess people were pissed off by the performance, maybe they were expecting to see a huge performance increase, not a performance decrease. Remember, just a few month ago, when V2 was launched it was almost 3 times faster than V1, so probably some thought that Banshee would also be much faster.

Banshee was a good card, it supported high resolution, it had solid 2d performance and awesome 2d features and quality, the price was very competitive. But it wasn't the huge step forward that most were expecting. And the trend continued, V3 was basically only a V2 on steroids or a proper Banshee 😀

Meanwhile Nvidia pushed forward with TNT2 (32 MB RAM and much faster than TNT1), Geforce (T&L), Geforce2, etc. Damn, I feel sad again, I'm starting to agree with Linus (Torvalds, not Sebastian).