banshee's performance with a duron at 900 mhz?

[saddy]

any idea how that will stack up to be? of course the banshee won't be newly bought, it will probably be an existing card to tide by until the next 'wave' comes. but i just want to know the performance of that before spending on a radeon or gf2mx to realise that i should have waited.

 

[3615buck]

It will be awful !
Since I had problems with my Geforce2 GTS, I had to use my old 16Mb banshee.
My 3dmarks dropped from 6400 to 1000 ! (on a PIII 667)

 

[saddy]

any fps benchmarks? sorry, i'm no good at 3dmarks. lol.

 

[PG]

The banshee only has 1 TMU compared to the 2 on a voodoo2. But it has a slightly higher clock speed. The 1 TMU means that if a game has 2 textures, (quake3 with lightmap on), the card has to run everything through 2 times to get the job done. It will cut your FPS in half unless you shut off the light map. Basically the banshee is about the same as a single voodoo2 in D3D games, but slower at opengl or anything with 2 textures.

And you will have a tough time getting rid of the 3dfx drivers later on. They don't uninstall very well. You might just try to get a cheap TNT2 M64 or a vanta. They have a dual pipeline and have better drivers. They would outperform the banshee and are pretty cheap.

 

[LXi]

You can forget about 3D with the Banshee, however the 2D engine is very decent even today.

Just for your info, the GF2 MX typically does about 120-130fps in Q3A fastest, I benchmarked my 3dfx Velocity(8MB V3 2K), getting about 90fps with 2 TMUs enabled, only around 60fps with 1 TMU. The banshee has a slower clock speed than the V3s, with only 1 TMU, you kinda get the idea of how it'll perform.

 

[saddy]

the banshee is an existing card. if retained in the new system, it'll probably be used temporarily for a while. just matter of "is it worth it to wait or not". the wait could also mean waiting for the geforce cards to come down in price when nvidia releases something new. or even for the radeon's price to come down.

LXi - what's your cpu and the res you're running at?

 

[LXi]

P3-600@800

Q3A fastest, its either 640x480 or 512x384

 

[Oyeve]

Not to be a pain in the ass, but why do people still say "but the 2d looks great". I mean really, 2d is 2d. I have MANY systems with MANY different cards and I can honestly say they all pretty much look the same in 2d with maby an exception to ATI cards. Just my 2cents.

 

[Fardringle]

3615buck: You only get 1000 on 3DMark 2K with a PIII667 and a Banshee? My system with a K6-3+ 600Mhz and a 16MB Banshee gets between 1350 and 1500 depending on the phase of the moon..

 

[Noriaki]

Oyeve, depends on eye sensitivity, some people notice a difference in colour saturation, to me this seems to be more dependant on monitor than video card, but more importantly it depends on resolution...at 800x600 you won't notice a difference on any cards.
But if you take a Geforce to 1600x1200 it's going to look awful...

 

[saddy]

i know how some people tend to pick on very minute stuffs. but in this case, i agree that there are differences in 2D quality. i used to be able to see a difference in the 2D quality between a voodoo rush, a S3 3D card (forgot what's its name now), and the good ones. they were running in the same resolution, same monitor size too. though i assume that 2D quality shouldn't be an issue in the graphics cards nowadays.

 

[vi edit]

Run a TNT2 @ 1024x768 desktop w/ 32bit color, and then run a G400 @ 1024x768 w/ 32 bit color on the same monitor.

Much, much sharper w/ the G400. The TNT2 was horrid That's why I moved over to the G400 in the first place.

 

[Zach]

Oyeve, depends on resolution, Noriaki has it right. Actually, I can see a difference using my 15" monitor too, between an old S3 PCI, Creative Labs PCI, Banshee AGP, and my Matrox AGP when I run it at high refresh rates.. it's hits 120Hz at 800x600 and there's a pretty noticeable difference..

 

[EMAN]

2D is important for a lot of people including myself.

If you got a 17 inch monitor and smaller than it really doesn't matter what 2D card you use but step up 19 inch and try to run ultra high resolutions than your screwed if you were using cards based on Nvidia.

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As for banshee, I used to have 1. It's a solid card but doesn't perform very good with multitexture games except "Half Life or Unreal"

It does have crisp 2D. If you can hold out more power to you but who are we kidding ourselves, you know you gonna go out and buy a GTS, Radeon, or Voodoo 5!

 

[Pauli]

I have since graduated from a Banshee to a V3 3000 and, starting last night, a V5 5500

The Banshee card has served me well in Celeron 450A, 550 and P3 667 setups. Playing games like WW2 Fighters, MechWarrior 3, Motoracer, and UT, the Banshee performed adequately at lower resolutions (<= 800x600). UT plays a bit too slow for some people, but I definitely found it to be playable. It is not as slow a chip as some of the people here make it sound.

 

[frover2000]

I have a banshee in my p3 600 and personally I feel it performs quite well, it runs all of today's games acceptably considering it was released almost 2.5 years ago. Unless you like running at resolutions over 800x600 it should be cool for a little while longer.