Who is the King of 3D?
Updated 5/27/99 by Rob Art Morgan (barefoot@hawaii.rr.com)

(For 2D results, check out the King of 2D shootout)

This test is useful for seeing how well your computer can "fly" through a 3D model that has been pre-rendered.

As many of you have come to understand, GAME performance is the ultimate graphics test and correlates with graphics performance for more "serious" applications.

 

3D Gaming King? Any 3Dfx Voodoo2 board.

"All Around" 3D King? Any RAGE 128 board.

 

• Most people who email me want to speed up graphics in all applications, not just when playing games. Saying that the 3Dfx boards are "Gaming King" only comforts hard core gamers. In a recent article entitled "Top Ten (PC) Gaming Boards," the fastest board was a 3Dfx Voodoo3 board. Apple must feel that they want overall speed in both gaming and business applications so they have cast their lot with the ATI RAGE 128 boards. To the extent that the game designers include RAVE or Open GL versions, that's a good plan. But real gamers will have a Voodoo2 or Voodoo3 board in one of the PCI slots... just in case. Voodoo isn't dead yet.
• I was told by the people at MacTell that the Vision 3D "works great" with Unreal (Rave mode), Quake RAVE, Tomb Raider (Rave mode), and other RAVE versions of popular games. I think there's more work to be done to make that claim. For example, when running Unreal's Castle flyby, the upper half of the castle kept disappearing. And the torches had two intersecting black rectangles running through them. At their suggestion, I upgraded Unreal with the latest 1.02 patch. Now it won't run at all under 8.5. Under 8.1, it switches to Software drivers. Maybe it should be called Vision 2D.
• The ix3D Ultimate Rez suffered the same fate. If you must play RAVE versions of games, you're going to either want the ATI boards (Xclaim VR, Xclaim 3D, Nexus) or one of the new G3 machines from Apple like the G3/300 MiniTower (RAGE Pro) or latest G3 PowerBooks (RAGE LT Pro) or a "voodoo" board of some type.
• For 2D results, check out the King of 2D shootout.
• See the hot deals on these accelerator boards at Deal Mac or my Hot Deals page.

• Test Mac was a 7500 with a G3 400/200/1M daughterboard from Interex. Mac OS 8.5 with minimal extensions including Open Transport OFF, File Sharing OFF, NO MathLibMoto, NO Speed Doubler, NO Ram Doubler. NOTE: Since the ATI Orion board isn't shipping yet, the only way to test the RAGE 128 was with it installed in a G3/400 Yosemite Power Mac.
• Walker 3D is a freeware utility from LightWork which enables you to open 3D documents and do a walk through. I use the "Spin" command in the starting position of the Sunlit Atrium sample document. Since the frames per second are displayed on the screen, I simply observe and record the lowest frame rate, since that occurs at the portion of the document with the most polygons.
• Unreal 3D tests were run with standard install. I particularly enjoy using this application to test since it exercises all subsystems of the Macintosh. The test used was the Castle Flyby that comes up at startup. To get the average and minimum frames per second with version 2.x.x of Unreal, you press "~" and enter "TIMEDEMO 0." Then press "~" to open up the full screen again. It begins the fly sequence at the castle entrance. (Get the latest latest 2.x.x UNREAL Beta from Westlake's Site.)

Many thanks to:

• Bottom Line Computing for the use of the MacTell Vision 3D Pro II Lite
• ATI Technology for the use of the Orion RAGE 128 and Xclaim VR RAGE Pro
• iXmicro for the use of the Ultimate Rez
• Interex (XLR8) for the use of the G3/400 daughterboard upgrade for the 7500.
• TechWorks for the use of the Power3D 3Dfx graphics board (voodoo1).
• MicroConversions for the use of the Game Wizard 3Dfx graphics board (voodoo2).
  NOTE: MicroConversions has closed its doors as of May 27th, 1999.
  The Game Wizard is still being sold by some resellers at discount prices. Supposedly, the remaining inventory is being sold to a company called iWonder Inc.

  Consult Absolute Mac, Deal Mac and my Hot Deals page for best prices on the above products.

  If you want your own copy of MacBench 5.0 , the CD-ROM costs $5 to order from Ziff-Davis.

  Click here for more BARE FEATS speed results

  © 1998, 1999 Rob Art Morgan.
  Gotta Question? Comment? Want to advertise?
  Email Rob Art at barefoot@hawaii.rr.com