| Orchid R3d II By Steve Page | ||||
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The day Orchid's latest dream machine arrived I witnessed grown men cry.
We received a retail version of the Righteous 3D 2 12mb and tested it first on a P2 300 with 64mb of ram. I'm not going to bother you with the technical specs, if you want those just use the link to Orchid. For those of you familiar with Orchid's Voodoo I card (the R3D) the R3D2 again comes in its 'Eygptian' box together with a great games bundle, more on that later............ On opening the box, once again the components look extremely well made and the pass-through cable could tow an elephant. The box also contains a SLI cable for combining two R3D2's. The manual is well thought out and easy to read. Bundle Ready To Rumble? And rumble these games do. In the box came Rage's 'Incoming' this is one of the most sought after 3D games this year. Activision's 'Battlezone' (which was lauded with extremely high awards in most mags) Gpolice and 'Ambush At Altyr Five', this is a custom 'Mysteries Of The Sith' add-on to the amazing Jedi Knight II. All installed and ran out of the box. Installation: Installation was amongst the easiest I've ever managed. I simply removed the previous 3dfx card from the system physically then via W95's control panel. (This is actually extremely important as conflicts with previous cards cause the majority of faults and crashes). The R3D2 slipped into a PCI slot, on reboot the card was immediately detected and politely requested its drivers. Now here's one bit of great news, (a first so far) : It actually came with its OWN drivers, I make a great deal of this as all previous Voodoo2 cards onto the market (let alone review boards) only came with 3dfx's beta reference drivers. This caused certain games to have serious problems and the list of compatible Voodoo 1 titles is debatable. Once the drivers were installed it was a simple matter of rebooting the pc. A point of interest for those of you who loved the mechanical switches in the R3D, (yes, there are!) now the card cuts in extremely quietly. Like the Righteous 3D before it, it had its own 'properties' page with gamma settings, vertical refresh tabs and the famous R3D 'spinning logo' .
Running the 'Test' on default settings I got 89fps straight away. However, if you hit 'advanced features' Orchid has its own version of 'tweaking' (more of a recognized 'certified' setting than previous unsupported tweaks) it contains a 'slider bar' which allows you to set exactly how much of your pc's performance to the card. On sliding the bar to the right I then got a stunning 140 fps. The 'Right' Stuff? Now to what's important, Quake2 on timedemo1.dm2 came back with an astonishing 74.6 in 640x480@16bpp. Whats even more incredible is that in 800x600@16bpp I got 73.4. It seems to switch between the two without any great loss in frame rate. Can't wait to test SLI (hint) as the fps drop is even smaller and can reach that Everest of peaks 1024x768 in 640x480@16bpp. The FORSAKEN demo came back with 108 fps with all effects active. Now here's where we swapped out the card to a P233 with 64mb ram. What came first to mind is how the R3D2 seems to be able to 'pyramid' performance according to your setup. All effects were set on full and totally un-tweaked.
Fox Three? As we all know its flight sims that really push the technical frontiers in 3D acceleration. Here are my results with two of my favourites: Janes F15 ran as though made for this card, no matter how many planes, tanks, missiles and mobile objects appear the card copes with no stutter or pause. It installed with ALL graphic options set to '5'. I made an effort to push the card by setting every other option to max. It made no difference what so ever..... I concluded the test by setting up as many 'local' explosions as I could, the only lag was my sticks ability to pan at that speed!
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DID's F22 ADF again ran out 'o the box, panning in external view was almost obscene in its speed, even with half a dozen MIG's there was no slow-down at all. I caused endless 'crash & burns' and went on SEAD missions to try and cause lags as the targs went up all to fault this card, I have to say all my efforts were hopeless. This is a general evaluation of the card, I'll be doing a follow-up on flight-sims with various pc's in the near future and will keep you posted. Compatibility Blues? I have to admit concern regarding whether existing games would run with the Voodoo2 chipset. Having received endless reports of problems with the 3dfx Voodoo2 beta reference drivers that Diamond and Creative supplied I was happy to discover that I had absolutely NO problems with any game that was designed for D3D, OpenGL or Glide. Even games that had OpenGL, Glide and D3D patches added later ran with ease. Only one flight-sim had problems and a patch is being written right now. I have attached my list of compatible games at the end of this evaluation. Another issue was over-heating with the Voodoo2 chipset. Diamonds infamous press release prior to the CL 3D Blaster Voodoo2 put the cat among the pigeons indeed. In this writer's opinion it muddied the field even more. I am happy to announce that the R3D2 ran my 72 hour soak-test with absolutely no problems at all. Results- Pro's: Extremely fast performance combined with quality components. Its own drivers that offer complete backward compatibilty with previous 3D titles. Tech support is excellent, a great software bundle, and realistically priced. Con's: No AGP support. However, having said that if you want to combine two cards together in SLI forget AGP as only one AGP slot is built in current motherboard architecture. Also, NO Voodoo2 cards currently available come with AGP support, and its this reviewers understanding that AGP will only be supplied by top-end developer boards until the near future. Conclusion: If you're going to buy a 3D card this year make it a Voodoo2. If you want complete compatibility make sure it has its own certified proprietary drivers. Find out if technical support is readily available, and make sure the card comes bundled with some decent software. (The other current V2 cards come with no games bundled whatsoever). If you want a comparison to current Voodoo2 cards and on this cards own merits this writers choice is obvious, choose the R3D2. Current compatible titles (These are titles I have tested and have accesss to, please don't assume these are the ONLY ones that work).
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