Ok. Now that we have a first screenshot that truly shows the Voodoo3 image quality, what can we conclude? Well its a bit risky making a conclusion using just one screenshot, so all we can say is that it all looks really promising. Based on the theory (found in these 2 articles 1 and 2) the 16/22-bit image quality should definitely be better than any other board's16-bit mode. So how good is it compared to 24 bits? Well its not bad, but probably not equal to it.- Do keep in mind here that 3dfx is not marketing their 22-bit as equal to 24/32-bit, they just claim that their output is 22-bit and thus better than 16-bit. Theoretically this is true.

Right now there are a lot of TNT2 vs. Voodoo3 articles out there and most of these are cheating on the image quality comparisons. Either they are using highly zoomed shots to show some insignificant details, or they are using the incorrect filter setting (could be due to a wrong or old capture program). If you want to see a good criticism of these zoomed-in tactics then check out this independent consumer review of the Voodoo3 board: link.

One thing remains to be seen and that is: What happens when there are many transparent layers on top of each other? Since in that situation you get repeated dithering and that might very well be unacceptable. As soon as I get the Voodoo3 board, I will try to check this. Together, with some colleagues, I am trying to come up with a small benchmark program that shows several transparent layers so we can see the impact of this on image quality. However, if there is some professional coder out there that has some code showing this particular situation, than please help us out and send us the program. We really need a benchmark that shows this potentially ugly situation.

One small final note: everybody is criticizing 3dfx today. This is wrong, that is wrong, this feature is missing that feature is missing. Well you can give criticism about any card out there: TNT2 isn't perfect either. TNT2 is not at all different from TNT1, it still doesn't support palletized textures (used a lot in games) and the lack of texture compression (3dfx has some compression.. though the texture size is limited), making the high resolution textures practically unusable. I mean why support upto 2048x2048 textures? Such a texture requires 2048x2048x2bytes = 8 Mb of storage! Naturally, you want MipLevels: add 33%. This means that such a texture requires a massive 10Megs... not usable is it? And what about their texture caching ? Its not very flexible is it? Unreal needed some serious reprogramming to work, since TNT1/2 doesn't support state changes very well. Now since I don't want to be called anti-NVIDIA (or Pro-3dfx for that matter): Savage4 isn't perfect either. Their external bandwidth is limited to 64 bits, its "only" running at 125 MHz, their drivers have never been hunky-dory. Matrox G400: what about the OpenGL ICD, and what about speed? Will they truly deliver? PowerVR Neon 250 : will it ever be released? Permedia 3 : same comment. In the end all boards and companies can and will be criticized but remember... look at the good things too. And AFAIK this 22-bit trick of 3dfx is a good thing.

A very quick add-on :

Just after posting this follow-up I received an additional email from Gary Tarolli from 3dfx mainly based on the previous 2 articles :

Congrats! You've written the best article yet. Your article was speculative, but your methods were very good,   and your analysis was very thorough. That is, you were   objective, not religious, like others.

We claim  we display  22 bit color because we can display 787 RGB color on the DAC . This is a best case, but is nonetheless 22 bits. If you display your ramps, which I strongly encourage you to do, on a Voodoo3,   you will see what I mean.

As people are now starting to enable the high quality video output of the Voodoo3, they are seeing that the output is actually BETTER than a TNT! Who would have thought?

The only problem is that most people don't enable the higher quality,  and it also appears we may have some buggy drivers out there that don't enable it.   It may take us a few weeks to straighten this out. 

Gary Tarolli 
CTO of 3dfx
 

So as you can read, 3dfx is working to fix the control panel. Watch this site for a future in depth analysis of this 22-bit technology using High Quality Screenshots.