The problem with being the first is that you are rarely the best. Thats the fate of all those other boards using the 3dfx chipset. The designs were drawn for games on the table THEN, but this is NOW.

Game designers are hard pressed to fit all the necessary textures into two meg of tex memory, and with AGP full main memory access in the offing, they are thinking in terms of even MORE memory for texture storage. A temporary solution is to up the amount of texture memory available to the Voodoo chipset.

Enter Canopus Corporation. Canopus is the first to introduce a voodoo card with 6Mb of memory: 2Mb of framebuffer memory and 4Mb of texture memory. Better still, the Pure 3D has s-video and c-video connectors, so that you can hook your TV to the card. Used to be this was really a lost cause; sending a standard vga signal to a tv made the blocky graphics look even worse. But with the 16 bit color output from the Voodoo chipset you may find yourself wanting to move permanently to the living room for your gaming! As with the new STB board, the Pure 3d comes with a large bundle of cables including those needed to hook both audio and video outputs to your TV.

Now what about that extra texture memory. Whats the deal here? Is it going to make a real difference in your gaming experience? Will there be compatability issues?

Is More Better?

Boards based on the 3dfx chipset boast two types of memory: framebuffer memory and texture memory. The memory that acts as the framebuffer is like that on a normal VGA card. Additional framebuffer memory gives you the capability for higher resolutions and more colors. 3dfx boards have been limited in most situations to 640x480 with 16 bit color, and with z-buffering off can do 800x600 if the software allows is.

Texture memory is used to store the surface images that are applied to the polygons; the polygons themselves are still rendered in the framebuffer memory. Its worth noting that the average game uses a LOT more then 2Mb of textures. Any time a game has to draw a texture that is NOT present in the texture memory it must either cheat and not do the work at all or discard some textures that are currently stored in memory and load the new texture. Loading the new textures means lost time which means a speed reduction, the whole point in having a hardware accelerator in the first place.

The graph above is a bit shocking, since it shows that the 2 meg 3dfx boards can really bog down in some conditions. The more demanding a game is on your system, the more you are likely to notice the difference, and the new flight sims are about the most demanding gaming applications out there. Will the average player notice a difference running Longbow 2 or F22: ADF on a 2 meg board vs the Pure 3d? Overall the difference might only be 20-30%, but in some scenes with demanding textures and effects the difference could exceed 100%.

My initial comparisons of Longbow 2 on my R3d (2 meg texture) and the Canopus Pure 3d are an average of 30%-40% increase in frame rate, but also fewer pauses. In fact, I haven't seen any! In F22: ADF under Glide the difference is as great or greater.

There are some older games out there that could have problems with the additional 2 meg of texture memory, but so far there are no reports on ANY simulation having problems with the Pure 3d. iF22 and EF2000 version 2 both run fine. Glide2x has always supported 4MB texture, due to the requirements for arcade and vis sim applications. Problems only arise when the application tries to store textures across the 2Mb boundary.

The Pure 3d Bundle

The Pure3D comes with a DirectX5 driver, and software that sets up the typical control panel. The DX5 drivers are stable and are comparable to the latest 3Dfx drivers. The control panel has options that you won't find with any other 3dfx boards out there, including the ability to overclock the card, enable or disable the TV output, and naturally, to adjust the gamma and refresh.

Is it wise to overclock your board? There are a couple of considerations here, but the first positive indicator is that the software allows you to do this! If you run your games and start getting lockups that you didn't have before, just return to your normal clock setting and see if it helps.

For serious overclockers, its wise to invest in an auxiliary cooling fan. Bart Lane has been retailing a setup that works fine, and $20 US will include shipping. I attached his setup to my Orchid board and have been running it at 10% overclock without a hitch for a year now. However, if you have a system that runs unusually hot, you may get errors.

The best thing about this board is its price: $179! You may even find it discounted a bit cheaper. The Pure 3d is, as its says.. PURE. You don't get a big software bundle with the card. But you do get top notch 3d acceleration, 3dfx compatability, and even the cables you will need to use the special features. How can you do better than that? You can even run the TV output directly to your VCR...now that is MISSION RECORDER mode!

v.1.30 drivers are available from Canopus Dec.19th.

Go to Canopus web site: Canopus

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