AMD Athlon Buyer's Guide - Part 3: Video Cards

One thing you need to remember about Expendable is that the difference in average frame rates will be very low, simply because of the complexity of the benchmark.  So a difference of 1 fps in the Expendable test translates into a fairly large real world performance difference. 

Here's something odd, the GeForce 256 comes in third place in this test, with the two Voodoo3's taking up the first and second places.  Earlier we mentioned that testing at 640 x 480 was a good way to test CPU performance as well as to see how well a driver was written.  As you can see here, even with the latest detonator 3.53 drivers, the GeForce 256 could still use some optimization with older DirectX 6 games.  The performance isn't "bad" but we'd expect more from the most expensive card in the roundup. 

Here the GeForce 256 regains its lead because of the dependency of the performance on the card itself and not on the quality of the drivers.  It is also interesting to note that the three Voodoo3's perform better than the TNT2 Ultra, and the performance difference is quite noticeable.  At the same time, all of the cards performed quite respectably and in 32-bit color the G400 came out on top over the TNT2 and the MAX finished higher than the the TNT2 Ultra.

Another very similar situation, first the GeForce, then two Voodoo3s and the Matrox comes out on top in the 32-bit color tests.