3DFX VELOCITY 100 REVIEW

"3DFX Velocity 100 review featuring Videologic VividXS using a Duron 900Mhz cpu and a JETWAY 663AS Pro. Software used was:- 3dmark 99 Max, OpenGL Stars and Quake 3 Arena."

3DFX's merger with STB opened up the OEM market in a big way, previously 3DFX was a small time player in a market which was dominated by companies like SIS. The main difference between the Velocity 100 and the Voodoo3 range was that the Velocity 100 was supplied with 8MB memory instead of 16MB and the 2nd Texture Mapping Unit was disabled for "memory issues". It was quickly discovered that by applying a registry fix the 2nd TMU could be activated with no ill effect and a nice performance increase. With the 2nd TPU the Velocity 100 performed almost identical to the more expensive Voodoo3 2000. With some benchmarks the Velocity 100 was even faster due to the use of faster SGRAM memory compared to the Voodoo3's slower SDRAM memory.

For this benchmark we are comparing the Velocity to the new Kyro 2 video card. I fully expect the Kyro to win hands down, I picked the Videologic VividXS Kyro 2 because like the Velocity it has no hardware transform and lighting which would give any video card which uses it an unfair advantage.

3DMARK 99 MAX 640x480x16 5435 7017 800x600x16 5074 6887 1024x768x16 2965 6699 3DFX VELOCITY 100 VIDEOLOGIC VIVIXS KYRO 2 COMMENT - "Due to the age of the Voodoo3 chipset I'm using the old 3dmark 99 max benchmark, the Kyro 2 shows it strength early and drops only 318points when going from 640x480 to 1024x768. The Velocity however although giving good performance at 640x480 and 800x600 quickly runs out of steam when using 1024x768, the difference between 640x480 and 1024x768 is a huge 2470 points."

OPENGL STARS 640x480x16 83 163 800x600x16 54 108 1024x768x16 34 68 3DFX VELOCITY 100 VIDEOLOGIC VIVIXS KYRO 2 COMMENT - "The Kyro 2 performs very well in this benchmark and is almost twice as fast as the Velocity 100 at every resolution tested. So far the only video card to run this test really well is the Kyro 2." BENCHMARK SETTINGS Benchmark Mode Enabled Fullscreen Enabled Hardware Only Enabled Particles Enabled

QUAKE III ARENA 640x480x16 84 103 800x600x16 63 98 1024x768x16 43 81 3DFX VELOCITY 100 VIDEOLOGIC VIVIXS KYRO 2 COMMENT - "The Kyro 2 wins this benchmark easily, as shown in 3dmark 99 max the 3DFX Velocity 100 runs very poorly at 1024x768, image quality is again very good." BENCHMARK SETTINGS Demo001 Benchmark 32Bit Colour Depth Texture Compression Enabled Lightmap Lighting High Geometric Detail Full Texture Detail Trilinear Texture Filtering