In order to test D3D performance I tried out Incoming, but unlike Tom I didn't get any amazingly high scores for Incoming. If you check Tom's scores his Banshee got a higher score than two Voodoo2's in SLI. I'll be talking to Rage Software about the issue soon just to sort out any oddities.
The drivers for Diamond's Banshee are getting new builds on a daily basis but nevertheless the ones I had, which were dated the 24th, were indeed fairly stable. Quake2 ran perfectly without any problems as did Unreal, Forsaken, Incoming and Turok. There were some games that didn't quite work though- Redline Racer and Battlezone were among the short list. But then again this could have been an issue with DX6 and not just the fact that the board itself was a Voodoo Banshee and not a Voodoo Graphics or Voodoo2 respectively. In terms of features in the control panel, they looked almost identical to the Diamond Monster 3D II drivers that we all know and love fully inclusive of Gamma Correction. Also listed in the display properties for Diamond's Banshee product was a Glide settings section. Here I was able to once again fiddle with the gamma correction, disable the v-sync, force mimmap dithering or limit texture memory to 2MB for older Glide games like Carmageddon. You will also be able to force tripple buffering, which will already be familiar to Voodoo2 owners. One very innovative touch was the Glidesweep feature which when used finds and rids any old version of Glide for you. This might not seem much but those of you who've owned various 3Dfx boards might well appreciate it. And although there was no slider present in this release of the drivers, Diamond have promised to implement one for overclocking clowns like myself.
As a side not I thought I'd just briefly touch upon Diamond's Banshee product's capabilities in Windows 98. But bear in mind, this is a gaming site and I loathe benchmarks that take longer to complete than it takes to rid oneself of constipation (I honestly don't know which is more painful). So stuff like Winstone is a no no. Nevertheless on a 19-inch monitor I was bloody impressed with the '2Dfx' part of the board which 3Dfx are so proud of. Yes I tired Duke Nukem' 3D and got some silly frame rate but more impressive was the capability of the board to go to a 1600x1200 resolution and in the beauty of 32-bit color. Top stuff indeed.
