Voodoo 3 wasn't for sale at the time I got my Deschutes 350 and I didn't really feel like getting 1 or 2 extra Voodoo 2s, so I ended up with a Viper550 (a Riva TNT). It also had 32 bit, which was so much slower, I ended up using only 16 bit for the rest of its lifetime.
wrote:wrote:wrote:Rampage was their first new architecture since Voodoo1. I recall reading that the project was a mess of feature creep and was originally planned to be released much sooner (without D3D 8 features). VSA-100 was a stop gap to have something new-ish to sell in the meantime, another extension of the Voodoo architecture.
Yeah, Banshee/Voodoo3 were their attempt to get OEM sales and it worked pretty well. Voodoo Rush was basically their first attempt at that but Rush was awful. I think Voodoo3/Banshee were as good or better an option as i740/Riva 128/TNT/G200/G400/Rage 128/Savage in most cases. Glide support was very useful at the time, and in general you knew the games were tested with Voodoo cards. 32-bit color was almost useless with those other cards (even GeForce 256 was iffy IMO), and the Voodoo 256x256 texture size limit wasn't a huge issue yet.
I never understood why they didn't push it more in the clock side. I can imagine maybe it was difficult to have enough chip running stable at that freq but the 3500 having it (on a TV multimedia all in one card?) had not much sense to me imho. I remember my V3 2000 with a fan went up to 181Mhz stable but no more. A Voodoo3 3000 at that freq would have maybe convinced more of the choice of the "fastest until the next model" idea.
Perhaps because GPU fans weren't really used very much in those days? Only CPUs used active fans in those days.
They didn't have lots of experience with this, maybe also because they never build the cards themselves (iirc some Banshees maybe had active cooling?).
Yeah but very soon other card were anyway goiing for it (TNT2 Ultra, Geforce..). I always thought the 2000 model would have needed the 3000 heatsink easily and the 3000 something bigger too.
