3D Graphics Cards An article from Alex van Kaam What are they? 3D Graphics cards are cards that are tuned to display 3D graphics faster than your 2D card and your CPU ever can. Because these cards are tuned for 3D graphics it means that they will display them very, very fast, the main reason for this is the fact that there is a dedicated Chip Set on the card that will take over the calculating job from your PC. 2 good side effects of this are: 1) Your CPU will lose less time on the graphics and can focus more on sound effects and all the other stuff that needs to be done in a game. 2) The 3D card can add lots of extra effects to games, these effects differ per card since not all cards (or better Chip Sets) have the same effects built in. Some of the important once follow here: Alpha Blending, this gives a special effect when you, say, look through water, the object in/behind the water will look more blurred. Anti Aliasing, this will smooth the 3D objects, so they don't have sharp edges but look more natural. Bilinear Filtering, this will smoothen certain areas with their surrounding areas. Trilinear Filtering, this will reduce the shimmering of a certain area compared to its surrounding area. Fogging, Visually making an object fade away as you walk away from it, like in a fog. Mip Mapping, this one you can see very clearly when playing Tomb Raider, turn it on and even from close by the walls don't look like pixels, turn it off and you will see all the pixels. Z Buffering, this is to speed up the 3D card, objects that are out of "view" will not have a surface so there is no need to spend time on them. All kinds of lighting effects, with shadows and reflection and what ever you can think of. 3D Cards basically come in 2 flavours, the all in 1 card, which holds a 2D card and a 3D card and the dedicated 3D card. Which one is the best? As you may have noticed there are several cards around, they are all from different manufacturers but are build around only a few Chip Sets: 3DFX Voodoo Chip Set: Diamond Monster 3D (Dedicated 3D card - pass through) Orchid Righteous 3D (Dedicated 3D card - pass through) Real Vision RV-Flash (Dedicated 3D card - pass through) Magic 3D (Dedicated 3D card - pass through) Maxi 3D (Dedicated 3D card - pass through) 3DFX Voodoo Rush ChipSet: Imago Micro StingRay 128/3D (All in one card) S3 Virge Chip Set: VideoLogic GrafixStar 450 (All in one card) STB Nitro 3D (All in one card) Diamond Stealth 3D 3000 (All in one card) Number Nine 9FX Reality 772 (All in one card) Power VR Chip Set: VideoLogic Apocalypse 3DX (Dedicated 3D card) Verite V1000 Chip Set: InterGraph Intense 3D 100 (All in one card) Miro MiroCrystal VRX (All in one card) Creative Labs 3D Blaster PCI (All in one card) MGA 1164SG Chip Set: Matrox Mystique (All in one card) As you can see the 3DFX, S3 Virge and the Verite V1000 are the most used Chip Sets, so they passed my 1st round although the Power VR is getting popular too. The best card is a dedicated card, a card that is made purely for 3D and leaves the 2D for your normal Graphics card. And since I had a good 2D card it made the choice even smaller, add to that the fact that the S3 Virge Chip Set did not seem to be a very good one then you will see why only the 3DFX Voodoo Chip Set cards reach the 2nd round. All the Voodoo cards came with 4MB of memory which is needed with today's games, so there was no choosing there. Another thing that has to be checked is the Native support of the card, of course they are all supported by the DirectX 3D, so any game that uses DirectX 3D can use the card, but DirectX 3D offers a basic support for 3D cards, none (or only a few) of the special options (look at the list above) will be used that way, so you want games that support the Chip Set...... After searching the web and several magazines I found that the 3DFX Voodoo Chip Set is well supported with patches for older games and new releases coming with 3DFX support build in. To be honest, while cruising over the web I almost always ran into 3DFX patches for up coming games and almost none of the other Chip Sets were mentioned. So after this to me the choice was clear, the 3DFX card it had to be, and then a Dedicated 3D card so I choose the Monster 3D card, the reasons for this were: 1) Diamond has a good name in graphics cards 2) When scanning newsgroups I found lots of people with the Orchid card who had to use the Diamond drivers for good performance. 3) I already had a Diamond Stealth 64 2mb Vram and figured they would work well together. 4) I never heard of the RealVision company so I was not sure about it. 5) As for the other 2, the same answer as with 4, and that fact that they were TOO cheap. So I went out and bought the OEM version of the card, it had no software but once it worked I could download patches for Quake and Tomb Raider. Installing the card into the PC was a breeze, it's a full plug and play, so no jumpers or anything.... one rule that was not in the manual but which I found out later is that your 3D card has to be behind the 2D card, you can have a few empty slots in between if you want, but don't put the 3D card before the 2D card. So 2D card in PCI slot 1, 3D card in PCI 2,3 or 4. Once the card was in the PC all I had to do was to change the monitor cable..... a small cable goes from the 2D card into the 3D card, and your monitor then plugs into the 3D card, this way when your starting a 3D game the 3D card will cut off the 2D display and will take over doing the 3D stuff. +------------+ | | +------------+ +-<-| 2D Card | | | | +------------+ | Monitor | | +------------+ | | +->-| | | |--<-Cable----<--| 3D Card | +------------+ +------------+ After this I turned on my PC and ....... yes, it still worked ....... Inserted the Diamond CD, installed the drivers and DirectX 3D...... rebooted.....tried it by running the Monster Test program and bang my PC froze up..... after checking the help files on the CD I found what was wrong..... I had a Diamond Stealth 2MB Vram, a card build around the S3 Chip Set. One of the reason I bought the Monster 3D card was now one of the reasons it would not work, it seems that the S3 Chip Set tells Windows 95 they only need 32Kb of memory but they really use 64Kb. And since the Monster 3D card's memory range starts right after the 2D card the 2D card overlapped the Monster 3D memory range, luckily there were 3 ways to solve this 1) change the memory range in the windows system panel for the Monster 3D 2) place a little program in your autoexec.bat file and 3) something very complicated which I didn't look into. A little note, the above error happens with all 3DFX based cards and a S3 graphics card, it's not a fault of the 3DFX card but one of the S3 card and the Windows Drivers for it, so if you have any other brand of 2D Card then the above will not happen. Anyways, after changing the memory range it worked like a dream, all the demos that came with the card worked brilliantly...so onto the real stuff... downloaded the Quake and the Tomb Raider patch from the http://www.3dfx.com site, installed them and off I went. Quake uses what is called GL drivers, they are created by the software industry since they were not pleased with DirectX 3D (which is just general 3D) and they wanted a dedicated driver for the 3DFX. The change is really big, the 1st thing you notice in Quake (GL Quake) are the graphics, walls remain walls, from far away or close by, it doesn't matter, they don't get grainy, then when you move around you will notice how fluid this goes. Water is real water, and the detail is so much better. Running Quake in Windows could cause it to slow down at times, even on a P200, running GL Quake won't, your CPU does not have to worry about textures and making water look like water, the 3D card does it all for him. Laura from Tomb Raider moves like a dream, all details set open and you still reach 30 frames a second. There are still a few "lines" that don't connect right, but this was also on the normal version so it's not a 3D card problem. For those of you who are still not sure if they want one this is a little list of Games that will get 3DFX support: (please note that DirectX 3D means it will run on any 3D card that that gets supported by DirectX, also this does NOT mean that you can't play these games on just a 2D card, it just means that you can also play them using your 3D card) Ascension: Myths and Legends - 3DFX / Glide version when released Carmageddon - DirectX 3D patch coming soon Dungeon Keeper - 3DFX patch coming soon F1 (psychnosis) - 3DFX patch available for download Hexen II - 3DFX / Glide version from box Jedi Knight - 3DFX version from box Mech2: Merc - 3DFX version is now available in the stores and a patch can be downloaded if you already bought the normal version MotoRace - DirectX 3D version now available Need for Speed 2 - DirectX 3D from box Shadow of the Empire - 3DFX Version from box Star Fleet Academy - 3DFX Version from box Stringer - 3DFX version Tomb Raider 1 - 3DFX Patch available for download Tomb Raider 2 - DirectX 3D from box Turok - 3DFX version when released UnReal - 3DFX / Glide version when released. Quake 1 - 3DFX / Glide patch available for download Quake 2 - 3DFX / Glide version when released Wing Commander V - 3DFX version from box Winter Race 3D - Direct 3D version and maybe a 3DFX / Glide version when released If you have any question don't hesitate to e-mail me. Alex (part of this article was build on stuff I read in PC format and on several NewsGroups) - o -