Over a year ago, 3Dfx shipped a combination 2D/3D solution. It was to offer Voodoo 3D performance and 2D functionality in one card. Unfortunately, Voodoo Rush missed the mark. The 2D performance was fairly poor, and the 3D performance was lacking in applications that combined alpha blending and Z-buffering. Unfortunately, one game that used both features together was this little game called GL Quake.

　　So 3Dfx went back to the drawing board. The result is a product code-named Banshee. It has the Voodoo2 core (sans one TMU) and a 3Dfx-designed 2D engine, all built onto a single chip, which should make it cheaper than the Voodoo Rush (which had two chips).

　　The Banshee engineering team spent a lot of time - maybe too much time - tuning the 2D engine, but it is well aware that a number of parts that had deficient 2D haven't done well in the market in the last several years. Even some core GDI (the GDI or Graphics Device Interface is Microsoft Windows' 2D API) functions are built into the hardware. Unlike Voodoo2, Banshee avoids some of the resolution limits of its older sibling. It supports up to 16MB of RAM, all of which is seen as a single pool of memory instead of managing the memory to be used for separate functions like other Voodoo boards. While there will be AGP versions of Banshee, the first set of chips are AGP 1x parts that do not texture out of AGP (no execute mode). Banshee will use a 0.35 micron process, so may run a bit warm - but no more so than any of the other 0.35 parts on the market, such as the Intel 740 and soon-to-be-shipping RIVA TNT.

　　Steve Shick at 3Dfx sent over an AGP Banshee developer's reference board. The board we obtained had 8MB of SGRAM and a beta Banshee chip. Banshee will be undergoing at least one more spin to incorporate a few more tweaks. The drivers can be best characterized as alpha. In fact, the current iteration of Banshee can be best described as schizoid. We popped the card into GameSpot's 400MHz Pentium II Power Rig. We ran all of the 3D GameGauge tests, plus 3D Winbench 98 and several 3D-accelerated games, including Tomb Raider II and Unreal. We also ran Winbench 98's business Winmark to get a feel for 2D performance.

　　Before I go into more detail, you'll note that we are not supplying benchmark numbers. It's my opinion, after seeing hundreds of graphics cards over the last decade, that printing benchmark tests of a prerelease part does no service to potential buyers or the companies involved. The performance of the final part can alter radically, sometimes for the better and sometimes not. In addition, comparing the performance of cards that have not shipped is a crapshoot at best. One company's beta driver may be more robust than another.

　　The Direct3D performance of Banshee seemed to be in line with Voodoo2. However, the mini-GL drivers 3Dfx supplied for Quake and Quake II seemed quite inefficient. Quake II, in particular, seemed to run slowly. Part of the reason may be the lack of the second TMU. Another contributing factor is likely just the immaturity of the drivers.

　　Of more concern were the large numbers of rendering errors I saw. 3D Winbench 98 is a great tool for catching rendering flaws, and we certainly saw a few. At 640x480, there were no visible problems. At 800x600, I began to see some fairly serious texture mapping errors in some of the scenes. At 1024x768, the status line in a number of scenes was garbled, and more texture mapping errors were evident. For example, several of the station scenes had space-station texture maps appearing in sky textures. When I ran the GameGauge tests at 800x600, I didn't observe any problems.

　　On the other hand, some problems did occur when we ran Tomb Raider II. Now, Tomb Raider II isn't the cleanest 3D engine around by any means, but I saw quite a few rendering errors, including frequent missing triangles. Unreal wouldn't run at all, but I didn't have time to do much troubleshooting.

　　The 2D performance was quite speedy. It's in the same territory as the Matrox G200 boards, even in 32-bit color. Clearly, the attention to the 2D core is paying off.

　　I point out all these issues, not to criticize Banshee, but to illustrate that it's still very much a work in progress. It feels less finished than the RIVA TNT and Savage3D boards I've seen, so it's clear that 3Dfx has its work cut out for it. Most of the GameGauge games, for example, ran superbly. I'm confident 3Dfx won't ship it until they get it right. When it does ship, you'll see boards with near-Voodoo2 performance that can run OpenGL, Direct3D, and Glide games, all at a price that will be more palatable to those who have been resisting the lure of Voodoo2.

　　Assuming that happens, hard-core gamers on a budget will be able to celebrate.