I had two of these cards to accelerate the 3D on my old Pentium 200MMX system with 64MB of SDRAM. It was able to play most of the popular games of the time like TombRaider, Quake, Quake II, and BattleZone with amazing realism at 1024x768. No other cards had the brute 3D texture processing force, back in 1996-1998, as 3DFX based cards.

A Little Techie Stuff

I say accelerate because a 2D, 2/3D card, or integrated 2D chip for the desktop graphics is still required. This card actually takes over the processing of any 3D hardware on your current computer and replaces it.

You may also wonder, "How did he have 2 cards in one system?" This can easily be explained by the fact that these cards can utilize a technology called Scan Linear Interleaving mode (SLI) that enables both cards to share the 3D processing capabilities. This effectively doubles the amount of RAM being used for 3D. However, you must have a SLI cable to take advantage of this feature and the cards must have identical memory configurations. They came in either 8 or 12mb versions.

All of the Voodoo2 1000 video cards were made by 3DFX and were considered "reference" cards. This is because they did not have any additional features that many vendors might add like video editing, etc.

Let's fast forward to 2003 and look at this card again. Is it still a good card? Yes! Can it play current games? That depends on the hardware requirements. If 24MB of Video RAM is all you need, then the answer is probably yes if you download the current drivers. There is a cult following with 3DFX based cards, so you can still find people making drivers for the latest DirectX and Open GL specifications. However, remember we are still dealing with 1998 hardware, so set your expectations accordingly.

Here are some specifications taken from the vendor:

Controller: 3dfx Voodoo
Bus type: PCI 2.1 compliant
Memory: 12-MB EDO DRAM
Core clock: 90 MHz
Maximum resolution: 800 x 600, 1,024 x7 68 SLI
Vertical refresh: 60 Hz to 120 Hz
API support: DirectX, Glide, OpenGL
Connectors: 2 DB-15 connector
System requirements: IBM or compatible PC; 90-MHz CPU, or higher; available PCI slot (for each installed V2 card); CD-ROM drive; VGA display adapter and VGA monitor; Windows '95 (with DirectX 5.0 or later), '98, or NT 4.0; 16-MB RAM; 10-MB available hard drive space.

Here are some links to the device drivers that you may find useful :

http://www.3dfx.com/

Recommended:
Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 99.00