Product Reviews

Because the Techworks Power3D2 works in conjunction with your standard graphics card, a video passthrough cable is supplied. This connects your standard graphics card to a VGA input on the Power3D2 card, while your monitor is connected to the Power3D2 VGA output. Unfortunately, this convoluted connection setup does slightly degrade image quality, and is unusual these days, as most 3D accelerators also include 2D support.

But the job it does do, rendering 3D games, it manages to perform beautifully. Based around the 3Dfx Voodoo II chipset, its Direct3D output is among the most immaculate around, with smooth textured surfaces and beautiful lighting effects.

The only way to test a 3D graphics card's performance is to run some heavy-duty 3D games using it. We chose Forsaken from Acclaim, Incoming from Rage, and Redline Racer from Criterion to test capabilities with games written to the Direct3D standard. The ever-popular

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Quake II was used to evaluate OpenGL performance.

Forsaken is a fast-paced 3D shoot-'em-up with some beautifully rendered graphics and intensive lighting effects. The Techworks Power3D2 card managed 59fps at resolutions of 640x480 and 800x600, but refused to run the game at 1024x768. Not terribly impressive, but in practice it's still perfectly playable. In Redline Racer it managed 42fps, and for Incoming it rendered at 58fps. These scores are more in line with 3Dfx's high reputation.

However, it was in the Quake II test that the Power 3D2 showed its mettle, proving that the Voodoo II chipset is the undisputed champion for OpenGL. It's frame rate of 53fps was double that of most of the competition.

All the above figures were achieved on a Pentium II 400 system. To see how these cards perform on an older system, we took the Power 3D2 and ran the Direct3D tests again using a Pentium 166MMX. Here, Forsaken proved to be perfectly respectable, at 40fps at 800x600, but the other games only managed an unplayable 15fps.

Our tests show that the latest games are getting really tough to run at a smooth frame rate. Not only do you absolutely need a 3D accelerator card, but it'd better be a good one, and be paired up with a hot processor.

If you're happy with you're existing card for Windows work and £100 is your limit, the Techworks Power3D2 is a good choice. It's considerably cheaper than our Top 50 graphics card, the STB Velocity 4400, and still offers excellent performance.