Home > Consumer Reviews > 3dfx Voodoo2 1000 PCI Powered 3D Accelerator

I just got this product the other day because i had a sorry ati rage IIc card, i have a pentuim II 350 mhz computer with 128 mb of ram and this card works like magic. I have unreal tournament and this game with everything on high at 800x600, i got an average of 27 to 40fps. For being an older card this can cook. Don't even get me started about SLI, with two of these together you get voodoo 3 3000 performance which is fast, very fast. This card would be a great edition to anyone looking for the best low cost 3d card. I recommend it.

I wanted to add fast 3D to a machine that had a good 2D card (TV tuner, video capture, etc.) I didn't want to remove. The Voodoo2 card did the trick...sort of. It works great and Quake3 and other games look great.

The only problem stems from the fact that you have to feed the output of the 2D card into this card. If I'm in 3D mode and something makes Windows flip back to 2D mode (game crashes, window pops up, etc.), the 3D card almost never switches back to letting the 2D video through.

All I have to do it move the video cable back and forth between the video cards to work around this, but it is annoying. The latest drivers from 3dfx don't seem to help with this at all.

The good news is that Quake3 almost never crashes and the card looks great at 800x600 (you can add a second identical card and chain them together to run higher resolutions, which I might try).

Even though this card is only 12megs remember that it is a 3D accelerator that is added as an expansion of your regular video card. This card handles the 3D processing exclusively. As well, two card can be put together to give 24megs and double the processing power.

To correct a few mistakes by other reviewers. VooDoo2 works great with the latest DirectX. The only problem you might have is if you are using old drivers. Get the latest drivers from [their website]
In many ways there is more support for these cards now then when 3DFX was in business. The user base for VooDoo is huge.
This card is very easy to setup on any system. I have set it up on Windows95, 98, 2000 very fast and with no difficulty. It is one of the easiest to install expansion cards I have installed. As long as you have the latest drivers.

The other comment made by a reviewer here stated that this card was only good for Starcraft. Well Starcraft is not a 3D game. VooDoo does nothing for Starcraft, you cannot even use VooDoo to run Starcraft because Starcraft uses NO 3D technology. However I personally play Unreal with a single VooDoo2 12meg card and it flies on my K6-2 350.

The other benefit of having a VooDoo2 is that it runs games using GLide better and faster and with more features than newer 3D cards since such games were programmed specifically for VooDoo.

Though the V2-1000 is an old card, it is still very usable, even with fairly recent games. We have three systems with the V2: an AMD K6-450 (dual cards, SLI), a PII233 (dual cards, SLI), and a PII233 (single card). Our favorite online game is Half Life (mainly Team Fortress), and these antique systems consistently deliver frame rates well over 60fps. Half Life has a 3DFX "minidriver" that takes full advantage of these cards in OpenGL mode! The primary drivers that come with the card work well - in fact, they are the only drivers I have found that consistently work at all. The textures are very smooth, and much more viewable than the rather grainy performance of many more modern cards in OpenGL or Direct3D. This card is a great choice for anyone with a slower cpu (or no AGP), since the card(s) takes the load off your processor. I'm sure I will have to upgrade someday (probably PNY GeForce3 TI200), but I have yet to see anything that will deliver this sort of performance on an older system. If you want solid performance using PCI on an antique system (like mine!), and your favorite programs support it, buy this card. Or better yet, buy two!

This card gets the job done. For may of us who don't have the latest high-end systems, this card is for you. I recommend getting 2 and connect together via SLI to get 1024x768 resolution.