Many gamers aren't even aware that Ubisoft and Guillemot have branched out from the sound board market into the video market, and the Maxi Gamer 3D2 is their Voodoo2 entry into the high end video accelerator arena.

Ubisoft is best known to most of us for their Game Theatre boards, whose quality and features rivaled the best out there and gave some of the better known names a run for their money. One would have reason to expect that the quality in their Maxi Gamer II (12 meg only) would rival the quality of their sound boards. In fact this board compares well to the other Voodoo2 boards on the market.

If you're a newbie to PC accelerators, Voodoo2 is the latest chipset from 3dfx, and is as near to a standard as you can get in this volatile segment of the hardware market. Boards based on 3dfx latest (voodoo2) chipset are being designed by roughly seven different companies, and there isn't a lot of apparent difference between these products, with the possible exceptions of Canopus and Quantum3D, who charge a premium for their products.

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Installation was a cinch, as it is with most 3dfx Voodoo 2 boards. It really only involves installing the board into a PCI slot, hooking up the pass through cables to your main video board and your monitor, and then rebooting WINDOWS.

Performance of any Voodoo2 based board is 2-3x the Voodoo1 boards; in other words, these boards really scream along. Like the rest of the crop the Maxi Gamer 3D supports the gamut of high end features like MIP-Mapping, Z-buffering, Alpha-Blending, and Fog effects.

These boards perform well in Direct3D and even better in Glide, the native 3dfx API. Games like Janes F15, Longbow 2 and Team Apache and coming sims like F22 Total Air War, F16 Viper, Apache-Havoc, Falcon 4.0 and others that run in Glide are really prime candidates for any Voodoo 2 accelerator.

So who should buy the Maxi Gamer 3D-2? We recommend that you check prices and if this is the best buy you can find of the Voodoo2 boards, get it. Performance of these boards is close enough that the only ones in question are the very low end of the market. Its possible that the few $180 boards out there may have sacrificed memory quality, and you should avoid them unless you have read a report from a trustworthy reviewer.