Test System:

• PII 300
• 1 DIMM 64 Meg SDRAM
• WD 6.4 gig UDMA HD
• Two 12 Meg Monster 3D II board running in SLI
• Win98

A Quick History

In days of old we had monochrome. Then mono begat 2d. Then 2d begat 2d acceleration. More recently 2d and 3d met and began 3d acceleration. I, like many anthropods with Internet access, was busy reading up on the new chipsets hitting the streets. Two in particular seemed to grab an early lead.

One was from Rendition and the other from 3DFX. However, it was not long before 3dfx, garnishing the largest club, leapt ahead. At first, only two companies supported the vaunted 3DFX chipset: Orchid and Diamond. Initially it was hard to tell whether 3dfx would grab a solid market share because the entry level boards were released at $300 US! But falling memory prices and broad acceptance as well as raw horsepower led to the rapid crowning of 3Dfx as King of the gaming accelerators.

The inception of Glide supporting apps was quick to follow and soon word of the successor to the Voodoo1 was being quietly spread. Voodoo2 was on the way and would be three times faster than Voodoo1, support graphics up to 1024*768, and could be combined with another Voodoo2 card to begin ScanLine Interleave Mode (SLI- two boards running parallel in a single system). By running in SLI a user could run applications in Glide up to twice as fast as running one Voodoo2 card.

The Voodoo2 Beginning

When word spread that the Voodoo2 was indeed a reality it's true popularity and success was guaranteed. Companies that did not support 3DFX chipsets the first time around immediately wanted to jump on the 3DFX bandwagon and cash in. Among the first companies to announce cards supporting the new chipset were Creative Labs (a non-3DFX producer the 1st time around) and Diamond, who announced a follow on to their incredibly successful Monster 3D.

In fact, the competition was so consuming that smaller companies, who could not compete financially with Creative and Diamond, were left in the cold when the first Voodoo2 chips were manufactured. Creative and Diamond had apparently invested millions to ensure that they got first availability of the highly sought after chipsets and thus waged their own private price war with each other. It wasn't til weeks later that companies like Metabyte, Guillemot, Canopus and others also released V2 based boards.

The Diamond Dilemma

Initially, Diamond announced they would only support an 8 Meg Voodoo2 card. Diamond reps insisted that currently there was not enough support to justify producing the 12 Meg version when the 8 Meg version was plenty for gamers. However, as anticipation grew and the release of both the Diamond and Creative cards was rapidly approaching, Diamond could see their market decision to only support an 8 Meg version would cost them market share.

As some expected, many gamers decided that if a 12 Meg version was to be offered, any extra memory could only help games run faster with more FPS. After all, if the memory is available, games will take advantage of it. Diamond made a tremendous (and intelligent) decision to reverse their previous determination not to produce a 12 Meg version and joined Creative in announcing a 12 Meg version of the Diamond Monster 3D II.

Click to continue . . .

Even though they were not able to get their 12 Meg version to the market when the release of their own 8 Meg version and Creative's line of Voodoo2's came out, still Diamond had realized that their initial decision was not in their best interest and capitulated to gamers demands. This has proven to be a profitable solution.

A new Creative Beginning

Creative was a company that decided to bet against 3DFX when they signed on with Rendition back in 1995. Although I don't know what their thinking was when they decided to move toward Rendition, I suspect they felt consumers could not justify spending ~$300 for a 3D only graphics board.

Unfortunately, this decision proved to be a mistake as sales for Diamond and Orchid Voodoo boards skyrocketed and sales for Rendition dwindled away. Apparently, they decided to not make the same mistake again. When 3DFX hinted toward the Voodoo2, Creative decided to position themselves in the forefront and be the leader in the Voodoo2 arena and joined Diamond in securing the first shipments of 3DFX chipsets.

Their decision to promote and support Voodoo2 no doubt has proven to be a lucrative one. Since Diamond decided to not support a 12 Meg version until just before shipping, Creative was able to secure many sales of their 12 Meg 3D Blaster to hungry consumers while Diamond was scurrying trying to get their 12 Meg version Monster 3D II out the door.

However make no mistake, now that both boards have competition on the shelves, one of these boards is still leading the pack.

Diamond: King of FPS:

Like many people around the world, I appreciate a good review and am always trying to get a better education on what is coming down the pipe. Although I hit many sites during the day, one I consider paramount is Toms Hardware (http://tomshardware.com). Tom always has the latest equipment and provides insightful and accomplished observations to hardware coming today and tomorrow.

When I received my two 12 Meg Monster 3D II boards from Diamond I had just read a new article on Tom's Hardware where he compared several Voodoo2 boards against each other to find out which board was the top performer. While I half expected to see the boards from Canopus and Quantum leading the pack, it was Diamond's Monster 3D II boards literally dominating the top spots versus other Voodoo2 boards including the Canopus Pure 3D 2, Hercules Stingray 2, Hiro Hiscore 2 3D, Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo2 and the Quantum 3D Obsidean X-24.

In fact on a few occasions, one 8 Meg Diamond Monster 3D II board was outrunning two 12 Meg Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo2 boards running in SLI! My first reaction was to think these differences were probably merely one or two FPS but instead often times the differences between the Creative and Diamond cards were around five (5) FPS. To gamers, five-FPS can be a HUGE difference.

In addition, Tom also stated that he felt the Diamond boards was one of the only Voodoo2 boards that could be overclocked and run stable. As you can see, I have overclocked my two Monster boards with NO problems to 95 MHz up from the default 92 MHz.

The Monster 3D II has also been altered from the original 3DFX "reference design" and this improvement has allowed it to be overclocked to 95 MHz in a stable fashion. Most of the other cards like the Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo2 are still using the reference design and thus are subject to overheating and lockups when overclocked.

Go to Part II