Introduction

What about the normal cards?

If we were to ask you about the fastest video cards on the market, you would be able to name off the Ultra TNT2, Voodoo 3 3500, and Matrox G400 Max. If we were to press you further, we could probably also get you to regurgitate their core/memory clock speeds. The online hardware community has an affinity for these high end cards, and sites tend to neglect the average video cards in favor of the newest and fastest equipment.

Even our site is guilty of skimping on the average card coverage. If you look through the video card articles in our hardware section you will only find one regular TNT2 review compared to 4 or 5 Ultra TNT2 reviews. We have a Voodoo 3 3500 Preview, a Voodoo 3 3500 Review and an article speculating on the Voodoo 3 4000, but we don't have reviews of the Voodoo 3 2000 or 3000.

We haven't forgotten

Why do we review all the high-end cards when we recommend the cheap sub-$100 cards in our Gaming PC on a Budget guide? Let's put it this way, if you get a Matrox G400 Max and a Voodoo 3 2000 in the mail, which card are you going to review first, a two month old card or one that's fresh off the manufacturing line? Then what happens if you receive the newest TNT2 Ultra right after you finish the G400 Max review? That's right, the Voodoo 3 warms the pine once again. Sure the V3 2000 will see some action in comparison benchmarks, but will we ever see a full review? Probably not.

We know that many of our readers are interested in the low-end video cards. There's nothing wrong with wanting a good video card that doesn't cost a fortune. Hell, that's all we want too. Want to see how the low-end current generation cards perform? We've put together a little video card shootout comparing all the "plain vanilla" 3D chips out there. The participants include a 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000, a regular TNT2, a Matrox G400, an ATI Rage 128, and a Savage 4 Pro.