Introduction

Wicked3D

You might remember Wicked3D from back in the day when the Voodoo2 was the king of the 3D accelerators. Wicked3D, the technology arm of Metabyte Inc., offered gamers the Wicked3D Voodoo2, the Voodoo Banshee based Wicked3D Vengeance, and Wicked3D eyeSCREAM stereovision technology.

After 3dfx bought STB, Wicked3D lost its favorite dance partner, and chose to leave the 3D graphics hardware industry. Even though Wicked3D isn't in the hardware industry anymore, the guys haven't abandoned their past customers. In fact, Wicked3D still updates its WickedGL driver, arguably the best 3dfx miniGL driver around.

WickedGL

The WickedGL driver works with 3dfx Voodoo2, Voodoo3, and Voodoo Banshee video cards in Windows 95/98 and has support for Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, Hexen 2, Sin, Half-Life, Heretic 2, Daikatana, Unreal, Starsiege and Tribes. There are actually two different versions of the driver: regular and high resolution.

Here's what the driver readme.txt file has to say about the two driver versions:

Regular version of WickedGL is the most compatible and most intensively tested version. It does all the rendering in hardware. WickedGL with high resolution modes acceleration utilizes the excess of CPU power to help video card to render faster in high resolutions at the cost of little performance loss in low resolutions and some compatibility issues. These two versions of WickedGL are two different driver DLL files and you can use any one of them depending on your personal preferences. WickedGL with high resolution modes acceleration has been tested with Quake3 only and should be considered a technology demonstration.

Installation

Before downloading the WickedGL driver, you have to first register with Wicked3D. Registration is free, and Wicked3D will e-mail you the download location of the file and a registration key. The installation file is a lean 1.44MB.

Installation is pretty easy thanks to the WickedGL Switching Utility. You just select the game, highlight the drive where the game is present, and choose which driver you want to install. Let's take a look at how the WickedGL drivers performed in our tests.