rec.autos.simulators

is there anything to choose between different boards with the same 3dfx 2
chip and 12 megs on? and should my 3d board or my 2d board be the agp one?
thanks,
--adrian.

At this point, AGP means no improvement for games. Anyhow, I'd recommend you
to buy an AGP board as other applications might need it sooner or later.

From my experience I would recommend you NOT to buy a no-name board, as my
friends who thought to be wise buying some no-name stuff now regret not
having bought the "real" thing right away. I learned that it's better to pay
more than to be sorry.

Diamond and Creative Labs rule.

Pretty much the whole point of AGP is allowing games that use lots of
textures, more than can fit into a video card's texture memory,
without slow thrashing.  It's a chicken-egg thing: we won't see many
games that really require AGP until the vast majority of 3D cards
support AGP.  Since the Voodoo 2 is so popular, very few games
require more than 4MB or 8MB of texture memory.  The *** flight
sim crowd ("Yes, we'd like to put a complete texture map of France
in the game and ship it on 3 DVDs.  Do you have a problem with
that?") will probably be the first to really need AGP.

Depends on the product.  I refuse to buy truly generic no-name stuff
because there's no contact point at all for drivers or warranty work,
but second-tier Voodoo 2 cards, for example, work just fine (same
reference design, interchangable drivers) and cost less.

Gack.  IMO, both companies suck rocks.  Both produce excellent Voodoo-
and TNT-based cards, though.  I give most of the credit to 3Dfx and
nVidia, not Diamond ("What?  Support that six-month-old card?  No, buy
our newer one.") and Creative ("It's 100% SoundBlaster Compatible.
Who cares if it sounds horrible and costs a mint?") Labs.

A tip to anyone using a suitably powerful newsreader: the new
"/----/a:j" entry in my trn killfile makes this group a ton more
readable.  (It'll kill this post, for example.  :-> )

--

spamgard(tm): To email me, put "geek" in your Subject line.

Whoa. Amazing how support differs from country to country. I had lost the CD
with the Soundblaster 64 Gold software, and the German support sent me a new
one for free within 2 days.