Budget Video Comparison - November 1999

After running all the benchmarks, it appears that the surprising winner of the prestigious AnandTech Editor’s Choice Gold award is the 3dfx Velocity. At just $50, the only thing cheaper is the Voodoo2, which requires a separate 2D card and is not as fast. For most people, the Velocity provides everything that the Voodoo3 2000 does at almost half the price. Like the Voodoo3, the Velocity doesn’t feature 32-bit rendering, AGP texturing, or large texture support. But it will cost you up to twice as much to get those features and those cards are still slower.

The TNT2 M64 and Savage 4 Xtreme are both also excellent cards with performance just a bit lower than the Velocity 100. However, those cards will cost you nearly twice as much. Further, the performance hit caused by going to 32-bit on either of these cards is fairly large due to the 64-bit memory bus. The Savage 4 Xtreme does outshine the M64 in this area, even though its 16-bit performance is lower.

The TNT2 M64 can also be had with 16MB of memory for $80. Since the 64-bit memory bus of the M64 will be more of a bottleneck than the lower memory count anyway, this really isn’t such a bad deal.

So if you must have support for 32-bit rendering, AGP texturing, and 2048x2048 textures, the call comes down to the Savage 4 Xtreme or the TNT2 M64. The Savage 4 Xtreme is slightly faster, but the TNT2 M64 is cheaper and NVIDIA typically has a better track record for driver support.

For CPU’s in the 300 MHz range, performance is limited more by the CPU than the graphics card. As such, the Savage 4 Pro + is also a viable option, and even the Voodoo2 is reasonable at 640x480. A CPU upgrade will be more beneficial than a video card upgrade in these systems.

If you don’t absolutely need these features, the Velocity 100 is definitely your best bet out of this bunch. This is one case where you get more than you pay for.