|
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
|
|
The 128bit 2D engine featured on the Banshee is actually very solid and the performance is more than acceptable, weather you're into 2D games running under DirectDraw at high resolutions, old DOS games, or in need of dedicated Windows 9x/NT performance, the TwinPower delivers. Visual quality in 2D modes compares nicely to its competitors only falling short to Matrox's G200 which still places first in visual quality and stability. As far as resolutions go on the 2D part, you're more than well-covered. 1600 x 1200 @ 32bit should keep most of you happy and unless you're doing very high-end 2D work it shouldn't disappoint you either. With the 250Mhz RAMDAC the TwinPower manages to keep refresh rates very high even at these resolutions, you'll find as we did that it's seldom the graphics board that sets the upper limit of refresh rates these days but more often so the monitors.
Moving on to the 3D bit we find the TwinPower to be quite capable if nothing ultra special. Based on the Voodoo Banshee it comes fully packed with a nice 3D feature set including tri-linear filtering, anti-aliasing and sub-pixel accuracy. The Voodoo Banshee is essentially a cut-down Voodoo2 'in disguise'. It comes with a core clock of some 100Mhz, which is roughly 10% higher than on it's sibling (the Voodoo2) but it lacks the dual TMU design. The lack of the extra TMU cripples performance in titles that require multi-texturing. This might sound like a serious problem but it's not, unless you are a die-hard fan of Quake II and other 3D first person shooters of that caliber that is.
The version of the TwinPower we tested was of course one of AGP flavor, while the Voodoo Banshee does support AGP 1X it has not been developed to take advantage of AGP texturing which is a shame. Nevertheless packing 16Mb of memory still allows for some high resolution 3D support, all the way up to 1600 x 1200 actually and there's still memory to spare for textures.
|
 |
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
|