I've just got back from the Live '96 exhibition at Earls Court
(London, UK) where I was able to spend a bit of time playing with both
a Righteous 3D and a PCI 3D Blaster. If you plan on visiting the show
you'll find the R3D's on the Personal Computer World stand.
Here are my thoughts/findings :-
PCI 3D Blaster
---------------------
I was only able to see Quake running on the 3D Blaster (don't know if
they had anything else there). It was installed on a P133 with 16Mb
RAM. I ran the timerefresh benchmarks at the opening screen, one notch
down from full screen (i.e. with the status bar at the bottom). The
results were as follows :-
640x480 17.5 fps
640x400 18.5 fps
512x384 20.5 fps
To be honest the frame rate/playability didn't feel very different
from playing Quake on my own unaccelerated P133 (32Mb EDO, Diamond
Stealth 3D). I get 16 fps at 512x384 on my machine, but the 3D Blaster
version still felt a little jerky even at 20.5 fps. OK the display
quality was good and the lack of pixel blockiness was noticeable (but
see my comments on filtering on the R3D below). Overall I was
underwhelmed, but I guess we have to see what other 3D software will
look like before making a final decision. I'm sure for some people
20.5 fps will be smooth, but to me it simply wasn't.
Orchid Righteous 3D
------------------------------
There were two machines with R3Ds installed, both P133s with 16Mb RAM.
All the software I saw was running from within win95, and I know some
of it was Direct 3D (e.g. Hellbender) but I'm not sure what other
titles were using. OK, here goes :-
Fatal Racing - This was running at 640x460x16bit with every detail
setting maxxed, and was AS SMOOTH AS SILK !! I always thought I'd like
this game in SVGA but have never found a machine fast enough to do it
justice. The game looked marvellous, and somehow the filtering effect
seems to be much more subtle than the 3D Blaster's (or my Stealth 3D
for that matter) with less of the "if it's close it's blurred"
syndrome. Perhaps it has to do with the LOD mip-mapping, I'm not sure.
Actua Soccer - As per comments above on Fatal Racing.
Valley of Ra - Jaw dropping stuff. Can a PC really do graphics like
this with such speed and fluidity !?!!? YES. Don't know about
gameplay, but I guess this is intended to show off the capabilities
rather than be a great game to play.
Wizard's Tower - At this point I was tempted to ask the Orchid rep
where he had hidden the Silicon Graphics workstation. This is a quake
style game demo, and the sheer detail and smoothness of movement is
staggering. Again the filtering effect seems very subtle, the floor
doesn't seem to blur as you get close, just seems to get more
detailed.
Hellbender - sorry forgot to do the frame rate test (z key), but it
did seem very smooth again, much more so than my Stealth 3D.
Scorched Planet - Seemed a little jerky to me, but nice graphics. Not
my kind of game.
Rest assured, once you've seen what this card can do it will be very
difficult to choose a 3D Blaster instead.
The Orchid rep said that they had "sent back" Monster Truck Madness to
Microsoft as it was useless (is this what's holding up release ? I do
hope not). That implies that it has been ported to Voodoo rather than
using Direct 3D. Then again maybe the rep just didn't know that much.
He also said it would cost 235 ukp in the uk and be available 2nd week
of October, suggesting Simply Computers as a good supplier.
Hope this has been of some use.
Jeremy
