Low-End PC Cards |
||||||
| Chipset (Company) | Bits per Pixel | Accellerated APIs | Board | Price | Pros | Cons |
| Voodoo3 (3DFX) | 16 | Glide, Direct3D | Voodoo3/3000 | $150 | Terrific 16-bit 3D performance; low price | No 32-bit rendering or z-buffer; limited to 16MB of RAM; lacks large texture support |
| Riva TNT2 (nVidia) | 32 | Direct3D, OpenGL | Hercules Dynamite TNT2 | $246 | Fast. Really Fast | Be afraid of the setup process. Be very afraid. |
| Guillemot Xentor 32 | $199 | Fast | Initial boards had a broken install; shipping drivers are a little old | |||
| Creative Labs 3D Blaster Riva TNT2 Ultra | $200 | Fairly fast; Unified driver | Unified driver still pretty alpha; older drivers in the box | |||
| Diamond Viper 770 | $210 | Slick 3D control panel; good utilities; decent software bundle | Not as highly clockable as other TNT2 boards | |||
| Rage 128 (ATI) | 32 | Direct3D, OpenGL | ATI All-in-Wonder 128 | $212 | Excellent interface for video functions; MPEG-2 video capture | Slow 3D performance |
| Permedia 3 (3DLabs) | 32 | Direct3D, OpenGL | 3Dlabs Create! | $212 | Robust OpenGL ICD for content-creation apps | Poor 3D gaming performance |
| Savage 4 (S3) | 32 | Direct3D, OpenGL | Diamond Stealth III S540 | $115 | 32MB real cheap; S3TC support; good control panel | Slow at high-resolution 3D; minor image-quality issues |
| Hercules Terminator Beast 99 | $125 | It's cheap for 32MB | Slower than most of the competition | |||
| G400 Max (Matrox) | 32 | Direct3D, OpenGL | Matrox Millenium G400Max | $220 | Fairly fast Direct3D performance; multimonitor support; environmental bump-mapping | Poor OpenGL support |
| Comparison of PC Cards | ||||||
High-End PC Cards |
||||||
| Chipset (Company) | Bits per Pixel | Accellerated APIs | Board | Price | Pros | Cons |
| GLINT GMX 2000 (3DLabs) | 32 | OpenGL | Oxygen GMX | $2,299 | ||
| Obsidian2 (Quantum3D) | 22 (!) | Direct3D, Glide, MiniGL | X-Series | $??? | Very fast | Multiple Voodoo2 Chips Best used with HeavyMetal PC System |
| Wildcat - Several Flavors (Intergraph) | 32 | OpenGL, Direct3D | Wildcat 4000 | $5,900 (inc. Dell PC) | Seems very fast on the Viewperf scores | |
| Wildcat 4105 | $6,900 (inc. Integraph TDZ-2000) | Seems very fast on the Viewperf scores | ||||
| Cobalt (SGI) | 32 | OpenGL, Direct3D | Visual Workstation 320 | $5,900 (inc. SGI PC) | ||
| Visual Workstation 540 | $7,500 (inc. SGI PC) | |||||
| Viewperf Benchmark | ||||||