With only the single TMU the Voodoo Banshee has a significantly lower texel fill-rate of 100Megatexels/second in comparisons to 180Megatexels/second for the Voodoo2 (a Texel being a bilinear textured pixel). Although, The D3D performance (especially) of any Voodoo Banshee under DirectX 6.0 is actually a little faster than a single Voodoo2, which should perk up a few ears. But we've said it before and we'll say it again- the Voodoo Banshee isn't really for Quake2 (or games making use of multitexturing). If you're an ardent Quake fan then be sure to opt for a Video card that is capable multitexturing (Voodoo2 and nVidia TNT). Nevertheless we put the C3DFX3 EvilQueen to the test and compared the results to that of the Diamond Monster Fusion, which has a similar spec. And guess what? The scores we're for the most part neck and neck, which of course isn't all that surprising since they are both one and the same board. Needless to say we were pleased with the results and also the reliability of the C3DFX3 EvilQueen showing that you don't always need to go for the 'flashiest' version of the same board. Thus under our benchmark tests, we found the C3DFX3 EviQueen performance correlated to the Diamond Monster Fusion, or any other Voodoo Banshee for that matter.
800 x 600 3D benchmarks - 1024 x 768 3D benchmarks
For all test results, we used the following Sharky Extreme test rig:
- Intel Pentium II-450 CPU
- Abit BH6 440BX Mainboard
- 128MB PC-100 SDRAM
- Quantum Fireball 10.2GB Hard Drive
- Diamond Monster Sound MX200 3D PCI Sound Card
- Asus 40X CD-ROM
- Win98
Other than the board itself, the C3DFX3 EvilQueen comes with a driver CD, manual and a couple of bundled games. The manual itself is written in both Chinese and English. We can't comment on how good the Chinese is ('cos we don't speak the lingo!) but the English half of it is certainly well worded and understandable.
As for the game bundle, this is something for a novelty for the Taiwanese. Usually what you tend to find is a bare bones product. The C3DFX3 EvilQueen does come with two games as stated earlier- although if you were to going to get excited by the likes of Pod and Tomb Raider II, then we'd be fairly surprised. With Tomb Raider III and games such as DethKarz coming out, it really makes the two bundled titles look decidedly useless. Still when it's for free, then grumbling won't help.
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