Both the Voodoo3 3000 and TNT2 Ultra clearly stood out, with the Voodoo3 3000 inching ahead by a few fps on each occasion (both in Crusher.dm2 and demo1.dm2). It's worth noting however, that NVIDIA's TNT2 Ultra (and TNT2) were running Quake 2 with a FULL ICD, unlike the Voodoo3, which was using an optimized 3dfx mini-GL driver. The mini-GL driver is a custom made driver that includes only the OpenGL calls needed for running Quake 2 (3dfx graphics was designed around an OpenGL model thus Glide is fairly close). Quake 3 on the other-hand may be a different kettle of fish as it requires full implementation of OpenGL and 3dfx still has lot of work to do before releasing an ICD that's as well optimized as their mini-GL driver. The Matrox G400 MAX scores were considerably slower and even though the drivers are still being re-worked, 3DNow! support isn't what it could be just yet on the Matrox cards.

We ran some Expendable tests at 1024x768x16 just for those of you that don't really care for Quake 2 (or Quake 3). The results were much less spread out (largely due to Expendable being somewhat CPU bound), although this time around the TNT2 Ultra was the winner, with the Matrox G400 MAX performing extremely well. The further on into 1999 that the entire (meaning all the developers that are not using QuakeX based engines) games industry moves, the more one-sided the D3D Vs. all other APIs will be in favor of Microsoft's improved version of Direct X, DX7. It's also worth noting that although the Voodoo3 is still exceptionally fast in D3D, it doesn't posses the ability to render in 32-bit externally like the other cards in the test do. Thus if Quake 2 is what you're still into then a Voodoo3 3000 is the card of choice for sheer 16-bit play however with Quake 3 in mind the situation is changed. Quake 3 supports 24-bit color (with an 8-bit stencil buffer) and as do many D3D games, which is where the TNT2 Ultra hits its stride as the fastest card on the block for the 3DNow! Optimized AMD K6-III.