Comparison of Cards: DirectDraw

swaaye

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I have a large collection of graphics cards, and now have a little K6-3+ rig I slapped together. I've been messing with it, trying out games, trying out various graphics cards...

I've been wondering if certain cards were more 3dnow/super 7 friendly. Or which cards drivers have actually improved over the years.

One of my biggest questions was which card offers the best DirectDraw performance for older games such as Diablo 2. Directdraw performance can be the difference between the game being playable or not on these old systems.

So, I got Winbench 98 out and ran its DirectDraw benchmarks on 7 different cards. It would've been 9 but the Savage 4 and TNT 2 would not cooperate for whatever reason (I'm going to assume due to the 112Mhz FSB and resulting higher AGP clock.)

Cards compared were:
Matrox Millenium G400MAX
Matrox Mystique
ATI Radeon 7200 SE VIVO (200/200)
Rendition Verite V2200
Rendition Verite V1000
S3 Virge 325
SiS 6326
3dfx Voodoo3 2000

A link to the ridiculously huge HTML file created from Excel:
http://home.new.rr.com/swaaye/wb98res.htm

The results are fairly interesting. Radeon isn't all that. Verite is a beast of a DDraw card for its time.....SiS is Sad.
 
Sort of silly to not be using the glide setup in Diablo II on the 3dfx card...
 
It's ok but it makes things pretty blurry with that patented 3dfx texture blurring. It's definitely faster than D3D though. Not sure how it would compare to DDraw.
 
Voodoo3 seems to be the fastest overall, though it shows a very anomalous result on the fill color depth/8bit test, not only is it suddenly the slowest of the pack, it's over 331 times SLOWER than the matrox card in that particular case! Extremely weird.
 
I was suprised to see the Radeon get beaten fairly well by the G400 and Voodoo3. Radeon is Rage 6 so maybe it's just using some semi-updated varient of a much older 2D core.

Another thing I thought was interesting was how some of the cards didn't support some tests (other than the tests where the cards didn't have enough memory.) The G400 and Voodoo3 seemed to have the most serious 2D DDraw implementation.

I didn't include the results, but I also ran 3Dmark99. The Radeon performed worse than the G400 and Voodoo3. In fact the G400MAX was 33% faster, scoring around 4000 over the Radeon's ~3000 (I don't have the exact numbers with me.) Something is either wrong with the Radeon drivers, or ATI disabled some things to get the card stable on Super7. It was running AGP 2X with sideband, but AGP texturing was disabled on it (G400 had AGPT available.) V2200 scored around ~1100 but had image quality issues.

I ran timedemos in Quake3 1.32. The Voodoo3 (41fps) was the fastest but definitely had the worst image quality. G400 (37fps) was faster than the Radeon (31fps) as well. All tests were run at Normal Quality 640x480. The V2200 scored about 5fps but it looked pretty good in quality believe it or not.

Overall I'm stunned how poorly the Radeon performed on the Super7 platform. I really don't know what to attribute it to.....I'm not convinced AGP Texturing should make a huge difference in these tests, especially since the Radeon has 64MB 6.4GB/s RAM. 3DNow optimizations may be really bad perhaps, but we all know the OpenGL driver reports what optimizations it's using and it did say 3DNow.....these were Catalyst 4.7 too.

I'm running the G400 in the system right now because frankly it just has stunning 2D and 3D quality and its performance is certainly good enough. Voodoo3's drivers are questionable. I don't really like trying to figure out which oddball 3rd party driver may work best.....and Voodoo3's a blurry little card in games. Voodoo3 however has 2D quality equal to the Radeon and Matrox cards as far as I can tell.
 
swaaye said:
It's ok but it makes things pretty blurry with that patented 3dfx texture blurring. It's definitely faster than D3D though. Not sure how it would compare to DDraw.

The glide renderer also has a few effects that I don't think are in d3d or ddraw, or at least does them better.

Well, looks like the voodoo3 was certainly a success for 3dfx's goal of creating a fast 2d and 3d chip.(I've heard that the voodoo3 is much faster at ddraw than even a geforce 3 or 4 too)

Oh, and the voodoo3 cards had excellent 3dnow support, while I think most cards of that era didn't even have 3dnow support.

Maybe the catalyst 4.7 caused the radeon's poor performance, try some older drivers maybe?
 
swaaye said:
I have a large collection of graphics cards, and now have a little K6-3+ rig I slapped together. I've been messing with it, trying out games, trying out various graphics cards...

...

Matrox Millenium G400MAX
Matrox Mystique
ATI Radeon 7200 SE VIVO (200/200)
Rendition Verite V2200
Rendition Verite V1000
S3 Virge 325
SiS 6326
3dfx Voodoo3 2000

The results are fairly interesting. Radeon isn't all that. Verite is a beast of a DDraw card for its time.....SiS is Sad.

*MUST RESIST NOSTALGIC URGES TO RECOLLECT S3/VIRGE ACCELERATED GAMES* :) :)

I think your results can be explained quite simply by video-memory bandwidth. Some of your tested cards have locked, known mem-configs (Voodoo3 was 128-bit SDRAM @ ~125MHz, right?) While others, like the Radeon7200, SIS, and Virge325 offer OEMs choices between cost and "performance" ("performance" being defined relative to what was good for a ~$40 SVGA cards...)

I'm guessing your 7200 VIVO was one of the 64-bit DDR varieties? My workplace has a 64-bit SDR (@143MHz.)

The Virge/325 and SIS can be configured as 32-bit or 64-bit DRAM. In the case of the Virge, the better cards had 50/60ns EDO, which was roughly equivalent to 50-60MHz SDRAM. The lousy cards lagged with "2-cycle EDO" timing (i.e. memclk = 0.5 * core clock), or even conventional fast-page DRAMs, for a whopping 30MHz effective memory-clock.

The SiS could accept either EDO or SDRAM. Early SiS6326 cards supported a max of 4MB @ 64-bit, but later revisions (SiS6326AGP) went as far as 8MB @ 64-bit. This means most of the 4MB 6326AGP cards really had 32-bit wide memory...yech. I have an SiS315 AGP with a 32-bit SDRAM (16MB) framebuffer.

Like its Virge predecssor, the S3 Savage3D/4 likewise supported 32-bit or 64-bit wide framebuffer. (The Diamond Speedstar A?? was a 32-bit layout for Savage4, while the Stealth III S540 was 64-bit for Savage4 Pro+.)

Benching a 128-bit SDRAM card (Voodoo3, Matrox G400) against a 32-bit EDO card is just plain ... unfair!

....

I had the PRIVILEGE of playing the S3/Virge edition of Tomb Raider. The developers were *SO* confident of the Virge's 3D-acceleration, the game defaulted to 320x240 (16bpp), and the frame-rate just barely equalled software (MCGA 320x200 256-color), on my AMD K5-90!

I also saw the "ATI Rage3D" version of Mechwarrior2 (one of my favorite MSDOS mech-games) running on a Pentium/166. In "accelerated" 640x480 16bpp, it was much slower than my K5-90 @ MCGA 320x200 (software.)
 
Fox5 said:
The glide renderer also has a few effects that I don't think are in d3d or ddraw, or at least does them better.

Well, looks like the voodoo3 was certainly a success for 3dfx's goal of creating a fast 2d and 3d chip.(I've heard that the voodoo3 is much faster at ddraw than even a geforce 3 or 4 too)

Oh, and the voodoo3 cards had excellent 3dnow support, while I think most cards of that era didn't even have 3dnow support.
Well, I've since started using the Voodoo3. You are right about the 3DNow. The Voodoo3 is very fast in OpenGL and D3D on this K6-3+. It's image quality is much lower than the Radeon and G400 however, and there are visual issues with polygon edges coming thru walls in Half Life (z-buffer?).

Diablo2 in Glide mode is MUCH faster than D3D or DDraw on a K6-3. It is very smooth. It also looks ok, much better than the Voodoo2 I tried it on once before.

I just picked up a Voodoo5 5500 off eBay to play with. Will check that out too. I've never tried one out and am excited to see how it compares to the Voodoo3.

asicnewbie said:
I think your results can be explained quite simply by video-memory bandwidth.

Partially true for sure. We are seeing different generations' results here. I thought the Verites are most notable for DDraw performance simply because they wiped the floor of every card below the Voodoo3/G400/Radeon gens. They are the best of their generation for sure. Too bad they are so odd for where they perform well...Windows 2D is just adequate and DOS speed is just weird slow :)

High speed RAM certainly helps, but the 2D core of the video chip is undeniably critical.

asicnewbie said:
Some of your tested cards have locked, known mem-configs (Voodoo3 was 128-bit SDRAM @ ~125MHz, right?)
143Mhz for 2000, 166 for 3000, 183 for 3500.

asicnewbie said:
I'm guessing your 7200 VIVO was one of the 64-bit DDR varieties? My workplace has a 64-bit SDR (@143MHz.)
No, the Radeon 7200 SE VIVO is a 200/200 card with 128-bit DDR. It has tons of memory bandwidth for the day. The 2D core is not wanting for bandwidth.

asicnewbie said:
The Virge/325 and SIS can be configured as 32-bit or 64-bit DRAM. In the case of the Virge, the better cards had 50/60ns EDO, which was roughly equivalent to 50-60MHz SDRAM. The lousy cards lagged with "2-cycle EDO" timing (i.e. memclk = 0.5 * core clock), or even conventional fast-page DRAMs, for a whopping 30MHz effective memory-clock.
My Virge/325 is a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 with 4MB 60ns EDO (it has expansion RAM installed, the soldered RAM is 50ns).

asicnewbie said:
The SiS could accept either EDO or SDRAM. Early SiS6326 cards supported a max of 4MB @ 64-bit, but later revisions (SiS6326AGP) went as far as 8MB @ 64-bit. This means most of the 4MB 6326AGP cards really had 32-bit wide memory...yech. I have an SiS315 AGP with a 32-bit SDRAM (16MB) framebuffer.
My SiS 6326 is, in fact, the legendary 8MB AGP variant you mention. With what looks like 10ns SDRAM.

asicnewbie said:
Benching a 128-bit SDRAM card (Voodoo3, Matrox G400) against a 32-bit EDO card is just plain ... unfair!
It was fun to see them all lined up, that's for sure.
....

asicnewbie said:
I had the PRIVILEGE of playing the S3/Virge edition of Tomb Raider. The developers were *SO* confident of the Virge's 3D-acceleration, the game defaulted to 320x240 (16bpp), and the frame-rate just barely equalled software (MCGA 320x200 256-color), on my AMD K5-90!

I also saw the "ATI Rage3D" version of Mechwarrior2 (one of my favorite MSDOS mech-games) running on a Pentium/166. In "accelerated" 640x480 16bpp, it was much slower than my K5-90 @ MCGA 320x200 (software.)

I had a Matrox Mystique 220 and Orchid Righteous 3D Voodoo1 back around then. Both were very impressive. I still have my MW2 3dfx edition CDROM. I used to switch between the Voodoo and the Mystique in Jedi Knight to compare the sharpness. Mystique's point sampling was arguably better looking cuz the blur of the Voodoo was just very extreme.

I sorta feel dirty for never having tried those lesser chips :) If I had a Virge GX2 I'd probably give it a go, but this original Virge is just too slow to be tolerable....
 
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