-Banshee doesn't take advantage of agp bus.
-Banshee better then single voodoo 2 in games that don't use multitexturing.
-Voodoo 2 better then banshee in games that use multitexturing.
-2 voodoo 2 in sli vastly superior to banshee.

-Banshee has more texture memory, which can reduce stuttering compared to Voodoo2 in some games.
-Banshee has more resolution flexibility.
-Banshee can do 3D in a window.
-Banshee has excellent VGA and GUI acceleration.

Generally, in single texture games the Banshee is faster because it has higher clocks. By the time the Banshee came out, though, multi textured games had taken over so the V2 would be faster because it could handle more textures per pass even though it was clocked slower.

Unless you need one to complete a 3dfx collection, I'd get a V3 over a Banshee.

And a Voodoo3 is an improved/finished Banshee 😀

Banshee was also relatively cheap and available with many OEMs too. I would easily take it over a Rage Pro, and it definitely was no Rush disaster.

leileilol wrote:

And a Voodoo3 is an improved/finished Banshee 😀

doesn't it still have a compatibility edge over the V3 in early glide games? I picked one up for about a $1 a few weeks ago and I'm looking for a reason to use it. thinking of swapping out the virge/V1 combo in my Pentium 133 system with the Banshee.

Banshee is a voodoo 2 minus a texturing unit, but with 100mhz gpu and memory, so it's early glide compatibility is same as the voodoo 2.

I my benchmarks the Voodoo II will outperform the Banshee in Half-Life, Unreal and Quake III, but the Banshee is faster with the racing game Dethkarz.

Banshee has 2D core and can do higher resolutions compared to voodoo2.

It is clocked only 10mhz higher but strangely enough in a lot of benchmarks it is much faster than 10% compared to v2. Is there any other difference that causes this?

In my benchmarks on multiple systems (cpu's from k6-2 to p3-1000mhz) Banshee is quicker in 3dmark99max and a game called N.I.C.E 2 (aka Breakneck 2)

Banshee is kinda cool, but I much prefer a Voodoo 3. Performance faster than Voodoo 2 SLI with a single V3 3000 😀.
I believe the Banshee and V3 share the same 2D quirks with some SVGA games (having to use VESAFix for some games etc).

The Banshee is perfect for Socket-7 systems 😀. With Voodoo 3 + Socket-7 I always have a feeling things could be even better if only...

meljor wrote:

It is clocked only 10mhz higher but strangely enough in a lot of benchmarks it is much faster than 10% compared to v2. Is there any other difference that causes this?

Such differences were not disclosed, like was usual with any 3d companies. Since Banshee introduced unified memory, I would guess they made improvements around memory controller that had to be new. More/bigger caches, fast Z clear with SGRAM, and so on. Faster triangle setup should also be tempting for them.

Yes seems likely that Banshee's memory configuration had more than just capacity benefits over Voodoo2.

Yes that could be possible. I think it is just strange that no hardwaresite even mentioned it as the banshee is sometimes over 30 percent quicker vs voodoo2 (in their own benchmarks).
All they talked about is that it was a nice budget card and because of the lack of one chip it wasn't as fast as a v2 in multi texturing....

I guess the world was all about Quake(2) back then 🤣

As always: i agree on the v3. It is still the best purchase for any retro system that has to support glide. Great availability, great support and low prices.