Review : 3dfx Voodoo3 3500TV AGP

Image Quality overview:

Image quality and options are a big part of any video card. Although many people are willing to sacrifice quality for speed, that isn't always the case. Another thing to remember is functionality. If the card ONLY works with great quality under one API but is bad under all others or doesn't even support others this makes the card overall a very poor card in quality. When I have asked some people what they thought about the importance of high image quality under 2D I got a few very basic responses : "Hu?",  "They all look the same to me", and "Who uses 2D anymore, I never leave the game". Ok so I made that last one up :) . Even though the general mood is that the 2D quality doesn't matter in the great scheme of things, there are a few people lets call them "videophiles" that are aware of the importance of this part. I happen to be one of them.  High quality 2D is as important as 3D, It is also a good way to tell the overall quality of the card.

TEST 1

To test a bit in a real world app and using my very picky eye at it. I ran through a few apps in 2D mode to check out how it worked. Did some Photoshop work on an huge image and scrolled back and forth and up and down to see if it would choke or pause.  I ran it at 1024x768 32bit Color Depth
Result - Impressive, it did it better then the GeForce DDR that I had here! But still not as smooth and robust as my Matrox G200.

TEST 2

Fired up Excel and loaded a nice 15mb spreadsheet. and scrolled around on that thing.  Swapped back and forth between apps to see if that would cause it trouble. @1024x768 32bit Color Depth
Result -   Smooth, once again better then the DDR card I had, but still not as smooth as the G200.

TEST 3

Took a folder and was dragging it around the screen with the flag for "show folder contents while dragging" turned on. This is surprisingly a very good test for video.
Result - Well worse then I was planning, lots of tearing and shimmering while dragging, it equaled the Geforce's pitiful trial. The TV app for the Matrox and for the 3500 were tested in the same way.  In that the Matrox wins hands down. The 3dfx card was very poor in that test.

Now I know that these aren't the most scientific tests around, and are very machine dependent. But I feel that benchmarks used by most other sites for these tests are over rated.  Cause who cares what an app says the card can rock at, when you are going to be the one looking at it more.  Your eyes are the best test machines out there.