by Bubba "Masterfung" Wolford

It is clear to see that the V3 3500 TV is really limited by the CPU. As the speed of the processor climbs, so does the score. In other words, the V3 3500 TV is waiting for the processor to get frames to the card and thus the video board spends a great deal of time waiting.

While the 3DMark 99 MAX score does not increase a great deal we can see the utilization of the increased speed of the V3 3500 taking over in the fill rate scores. Even though 3DMark 99 MAX is known to be fill rate limited, with just a mere 17 MHz jump the difference in fill rate throughput for the cards is huge. Because the CPU is not getting frames to the card fast enough, the fill rate requirements are not even close to the maximum the card can produce.

Summary

The introduction of the Voodoo3 3500 TV may seem late by some standards. It almost appears that way to me since I have had a Voodoo3 card for so many months now. There are so many distinguishing characteristics of this card, however, apart from the 183MHz clock rate, that this board kick some serious butt.

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VCR Control

Several parts of the Voodoo3 3500 TV make it really unique. You can record a channel, video input or composite video to your HD in AVI or MPEG2 format. You can browse multiple channels but as with the Matrox G200, only one is active at any time.

The introduction of a Desktop TV feature along with the TV tuner, FM tuner, Digital VCR, etc... along with blazing 3D and 2D make the Voodoo3 3500 TV every bit the competitor for Nvidia's and Matrox's best while easily blowing away the ATI All in Wonder and G200 Marvel in 3D and 2D speed, it either matches or surpasses them in TV quality.

Due to a recent driver release for the 3500 TV, TV and capture image quality jumped a great deal, putting the 3500 TV in it's own class. Never before have gamers had the chance to own a truly excellent 3D/2D integrated accelerator while also owning a fabulous TV features card too. All this for under $250, the V3 3500 should be considered the King of ALL video cards!!!

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