A Banshee is basically a gimped Voodoo 2 (one less texturing unit) that also does 2D.. but it runs at a higher clock speed than a Voodoo 2. So it should be faster than a Voodoo 2 in games that don't use multi texturing but a lot slower in games that do.

The Voodoo 3 should be over twice as fast for most things.

Voodoo Banshee vs Voodoo II

A Banshee is basically a gimped Voodoo 2

Banshee is not just gimped Voodoo 2. It's the first card with improved post-filter aka "22-bit color", which was so hyped up after Voodoo 3 release. Banshee also improved subpixel precision, which Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 had some problems with.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-08-21, 19:15:

A Banshee is basically a gimped Voodoo 2

Banshee is not just gimped Voodoo 2. It's the first card with improved post-filter aka "22-bit color", which was so hyped up after Voodoo 3 release. Banshee also improved subpixel precision, which Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 had some problems with.

I was talking performance-wise.

even performance-wise, the more efficient 16mb unified memory pool on banshee should help with some of the texture thrashing that can occur on v2, as v2 12mb only has 4mb per texture unit.

calling v3 an expanded banshee is a lot more appropriate than calling banshee a gimped v2.

You can think of the Banshee as a proto Voodoo 3. The V3 is basically a Banshee with another TMU (which translates to roughly twice the performance in anything that uses multitexturing) and is also clocked significantly higher thanks to the smaller node. I believe standard Banshee is 100Mhz and V3 2000 is 143MHz, 3000 is 166MHz and 3500 is 183MHz. The performance difference is massive.

Banshee can be pretty nice for 640x480 though, especially on a slower Pentium 2 and the like.

Would you put a fan on a Banshee ?

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2020-08-22, 22:15:

Would you put a fan on a Banshee ?

Yes! these things are well known to get hot

I had a PCI Banshee for a while in my (now retired) PPro system with a comically small green heatsink. I got so concerned with how hot it got (it surprisingly wasn't fussy about it at all in actual use) that I rigged up a 120mm fan between the supports for the monitor in my case to blow air over it. Absolutely give it a fan (or a much bigger heatsink) if you can.

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2020-08-21, 17:07:

What is the performance difference between a 16mb AGP Ensoniq Voodoo Banshee vs. a AGP Voodoo 3 3000 with 16mb ?
Do they both use the same 3dfx chip ? If Not what is the difference ?

I´m curious. What driver are you using with that partucular Banshee?
I own exactly the same model of Voodoo Banshee you´ve got there.
It happens to me that when trying to install the latest reference drivers (1.04.00_Win9x), the card is not recongnized, drivers do not install. If I force them, bad things happen (...)
Other 3rd party driver called "BansheeTeam Evolution V0.9" does install properly. Also, If I force the installation of the driver included in "Soporific´s Windows 98 Driver Pack", everything is fine.