Why did/do people always put down the banshee?

CrazyRyan

Banned
Jul 10, 2001
355
0
0
I had a diamond monster fusion back in the day, my first 3d accelerator btw and it ran everything I wanted it to just fine! even at 1024x768 most games ran fine
 

spanky

Lifer
Jun 19, 2001
25,716
3
81
i had a banshee (not when it was new tho)... it might have been decent in its day, but it no doubt sux now (just like how todays video cards will suck three years later).
 

tenoc

Golden Member
Jan 23, 2002
1,270
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Why did/do people always put down the banshee?

Who is? Point the dastard out to me! I'll reduce his cheekbones to cartilage, I'll give him such a spanking!

Fine card for its day at a reasonable price. Still have mine in my back-up's back-up.
 

vss1980

Platinum Member
Feb 29, 2000
2,944
0
76
The banshee itself was not a bad product, but when compared to the competition at the time (TNT came out around the same time) it just couldn't quite match them.
Not taking into account glide support (because at that time everyone was moving towards the OpenGL and D3D standards anyway), it lacked a few important features such as full AGP support, 32-bit colour rendering (not real important at that time as performance hit was bad anyway), lacked support for textures larger than 256x256, and that it ran ludicriously hot compared to just about everything else all counted against it.

In a way it was a good attempt at trying to get Voodoo2 SLI performance into one card, but it didn't actually offer anything else other than that.
 

DBZGokuKS

Junior Member
Feb 25, 2001
21
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I owned one (Monster Fusion PCI) too. It wasn't bad at all, and it's actually been a very reliable card for me. Didn't offer outstanding performance and was outclassed by the TNT, but a decent card nonetheless.

~KS
 

merlocka

Platinum Member
Nov 24, 1999
2,832
0
0
The main reason the banshee sucked is that 3dfx chose not to add the second texture unit. This would have made the banshee faster than a Voodoo2, and 3dfx management was so proud of the Voodoo2 sales they didn't want to compete with themselves. They took a step back while nVidia and ATI jumped forward with the TnT and Rage128.

Had they done this (implement Banshee with dual textures), the change to the Voodoo3 would be just a die shrink. Drivers would have been solid, and V3 would have shown much better against TnT2.

In addition, they would have had much more time to get VSA100 to market and get some OEM wins which might have kept the company afloat.

If VSA100 gets to market on time (to compete with original Geforce), they mighta made enough money to finish Rampage...

Like the CEO of nVidia said... a graphics card company is 60 days away from going out of business. (or something like that). 3dfx's 60 days were the release of the Banshee. IMO.



 

SleepyGuy

Senior member
Dec 20, 2000
588
0
0
Never got the to use the banshee at its time BUT i used the Voodoo Rush! Voodoo1 integrated w/2D. I loved that card... motoracer was super smooth... not to mention free! Ah those were the days... but my Radeon 8500 is doing well :)
 

Rand

Lifer
Oct 11, 1999
11,071
1
81
It got a bad rep as the classic TNT was often a bit faster and had a clearly better 3D feature set then did the Banshee.

It had a few saving graces in that at the time the Banshee was one of the very few decent 3D cards that worked properly on Socket7 mainboards which were still reasonably popular with the K6-2 in that period. It also supported GLide which was starting to die down slightly but a large number of games supported it, and virtually all sports games were still GLide supporting.
The excellent 2D visual quality was also a nice bonus for those that cared for high resolutions.

I had a Guillemot MaxiGamer Phoenix based on the Voodoo Banshee for quite awhile. In all honesty, I don't think I've ever been as pleased with any graphics card as I was with that board at the time.

It had it's clear disadvantages.. lack of full AGP support, limited texture sizes, lack of 32bit rendering in 3D, lack of multi-texturing support etc
But for me at least, and a few others it had a handful of advanatges that more then made up for that.

I'll always fondly remember the old Banshee.