🚀 go-pugleaf

On Wed, 14 Apr 1999 17:37:48 GMT,
briansheehan@spindoctor.freeserve.co.uk (Brian Sheehan) wrote:

>Here's an decision I have to make for a friend,
>
>Do I install a Voodoo2 from Scan (badged Mercury) alongside his Matrox
>Millenium 2 - 230 dac
>
>or do I buy a new Creative Labs PCI TNT card and put the Matrox and
>Voodoo2  into another machine.
>
>Price will be about the same whichever option I choose.
>
>The machine it's going into is a Pentium 233mmx on an Asus TX board
>with 64mb of ram.

The answer is pretty easy since you say there's going to be no
upgrades soon - neither of the above cards !

Go buy a dirt-cheap (20 quid or so) Voodoo 1 card. Reason : both the
Voodoo2 card & the TNT card (this one will take a *big* hit) are going
to be severely limited by the CPU's speed.

A P233 does not have the FPU to do justice to either a Voodoo2 or a
TNT card. On a TNT frame rates will be *very* low, and on a Voodoo2
they'll be no better than on a Voodoo1 (on multitexture games like
Quake2 they'll be better because of the second TMU - but they're not
all that common ATM).

OK - the Voodoo2 can do 800x600, but on recent games that would be
unplayable on a P233 (IMHO). Forget about the TNT card as it is *far*
more dependant on the FPU in the processor than Voodoo is.

YMMV, but I've been through this "loop" several times and although
customers want the "latest & greatest" once you explain (& demo) it to
them they start to understand.

If you can find a cheap (40 quid or so) Voodoo2 card that's fine, but
being realistic about this a Voodoo1 card would be the right
"match-up".

HTH.