![]() ![]() ![]() But poor drivers and production yield caused the chip to flop.ĭespite the scepticism of the gamers and nVidia's strong TNT chip, 1 million Banshee chips were sold until December '98 and it became another success - especially in the OEM market. S3's Savage 3D was a not bad chip and performed quite well, especially when its new S3TC texture compression could be used. But its performance was inferior and the lacking OpenGL support didn't exactly help either. The Matrox G200 was already around for some time and offered equally good 2D quality as the 3dfx Banshee. nVidia's Riva TNT threw some new "important" features (like 32-bit rendering) in the ring and was an excellent performer overall. The only real threat was the TNT, which was intended to rival the 3dfx Voodoo 2. The competing chipsets back in the day were nVidia's Riva TNT, Matrox G200 and the S3 Savage 3D. In terms of pricing, the chip was placed in the midrange market, with a launch price of around 300 DM (in germany). But the Banshee was exactly that: a top notch 2D solution with enough power for gaming - complemented by best-in-class compatibility for games. Back then, it wasn't usual to release the fastest card first and cut-down versions later - every new card was expected to be the next "big bang". In games that did not use Multitexturing, the card was able to outperform and to render higher resolutions than a Voodoo 2, which was limited to 800圆00 (SLI: 1024x768).ģdfx did not release the Banshee as a successor to the Voodoo 2 but gamers nevertheless expected higher performance of any newer product. The performance in games was slightly behind a single Voodoo 2 in average, as the chip was clocked higher but could not do Single Pass Multitexturing like the SST-2 could. The 2D signal quality could even rival Matrox cards, which were known to offer top notch 2D quality. The Banshee featured a 128Bit 2D core matching VESA 3.0 specifications, which enabled the chip to be one of the fastest DOS gaming platform available - or to put it in 3dfx's words: " DOS speed beyond belief". All Windows GDI functions were implemented in hardware. In a nutshell - the Rush had no true strengths but a lot of weaknesses.ģdfx did not want to make the same mistakes again und armed the chip with one of the fastest 2D cores on the market. Its 2D image quality (especially on cards using the Macronix "MX" chipset) was also pretty bad - the cards mostly had RAMDAC clocks as low as 160 - 180 MHz, which didn't allow for high 2D resolutions and refresh rates. On top of that, many games showed compatibility problems with early driver versions. The Rush managed to be more or less an instant failure thanks to (sometimes drastically) inferior performance compared to older Voodoo Graphics. The previously released 2D/3D card "Voodoo Rush" was a combination of a slightly altered Voodoo Graphics 3D chipset as well as a 3rd party 2D chip on a single board. The 3dfx Banshee was the first true 2D/3D chip made by 3dfx and hit the market in early October, 1998.
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