Performance:
The Pentium II 300 doesn't have the horsepower to keep this card fed, or at least
to push it to the maximum. A PII 400 or greater would be needed for that I think.
Below is a table of framerates in Quake and Quake II at various resolutions. The
Quake II framerates are done with the maximum quality autoexec.cfg file from 3 fingers.
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Quake II tests run w/max quality settings.
Test System PII/300 w/128MB Sdram, Windows 95.
All scores in frames per second (FPS)
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Game
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Demo1
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Demo2
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Quake 640x480
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104
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108.5
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Quake 800x600
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94.7
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95.4
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Quake 1024x768
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62.8
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60.5
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Quake II 640x480
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66.5
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62.0
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Quake II 800x600
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66.2
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61.2
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Quake II 1024x768
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62.1
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58.5
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Summary:
At $599.95 the Obsidian2 24X is not for the average gamer. [Note: as of Nov 1999 the price is now about $300 list, still expensive considering a Voodoo3 3000 is 1/2 that price and does 2d as well as better game performance.] Unless you have only
one free PCI slot and absolutely must have to have SLI you'd be better off with two
standard Voodoo II cards. The two card setup also allows disabling SLI mode for games
that do not run reliably in SLI mode. I'm not the only one that saw thermal issues
with the Obsidian2, a quick search of the newsgroups immediately turned up a comment
from another Obsidian2 24X owner that reported he had to immediately add a fan to
prevent lockups as well. In general it seems the 2 card setup runs cooler, at least
at the default 90MHz clock rate. With 12MB Voodoo II cards running as low as $209
or less (Creative 12MB card price at a recent PC computer show), two cards also can
cost less than the Obsidian2 24X.
Quake II screenshots at 1024x768, 16-bit color.
Clicking on the 320x240 images below will show a medium compressed
actual size (1024x768!) version of the image. Warning - full size jpegs are about 120-150K each (even with medium compression).
 
 
 
 
I know these pages are 'heavy' but I refused to make the images a postage stamp :-).
The next page will show the framerates and screenshots
in Unreal at 1024x768.
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