ATI Expert 128 vs. Voodoo 3

[Rapamatic]

Which is better for non-gaming use. ATI Expert 128 16 MB or 3dFX Voodoo 3 16 MB.

My main rig currently has the Voodoo card in it (from Dell). I got an old P2 300 from work that I'm going to run *nix on, and I just bought the ATI card for that. However, if the ATI card is better, I'll put that in my main rig and use the 3dFX card for *nix.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Rand]

hmm, that's debateable.
The V3 has slightly better 2D visual quality then the Rage 128.
The Rage 128 has better DVD playback, and the *nix drivers for ATi are typically excellent as the open source community is big on ATi.
The 3dfx Voodoo3 isnt supported anymore, but the existing drivers are already quite good so you shouldnt have any problems unless your running WinXP which 3dfx never released official drivers for.

 

[Rapamatic]

I guess I'll keep the V3 in my main rig then. I don't play DVD's with it, so the superior 2D quality should be the key factor, and I'm running 2k and don't intend to run XP.

Also sounds like the ATI will work better with *nix than the V3.

Thanks!

 

[Rand]

<<

<< The Rage 128 has better DVD playback >>



So can this thing really play DVDs at 30FPS and scale the video? Is it powerful enough for that? For example, the Rage 128Pro 32MB? I heard awful stories about ATI cards hanging and ruining the system stability, even on pure Intel systems. Is this true?

And more, if you were to choose between a Radeon VE and a Rage 128Pro, what would you choose for almost the same price?

<------- just choosing a cheap, but good and stable and 2D-functional card for my second comp... >>



ATi's driver problems are vastly over hyped, their not perfect but their not so incredibly poor as some make out. They've also improved quite a lot overt the last few months and the Rage 128 is a very mature chipset, and they've had plenty of time to iron out any issues there once was.

Between a Radeon VE and a Rage 128, I would definitely choose the Radeon VE.

Yes, the Rage 128 is easily more then adequate to play back DVD's smoothly on anything more then a PII/Celeron 300MHz. In-sofar as DVD playback is concerned, ATi has long had the best hardware DVD playback available and even their old Rage 128 cards are more then a match for the majority of competing modern cards in terms of DVD capabilities. DVD is probably the single aspect one has never had to worry about from ATi.