Pace 3D Edge

Perhaps one of the best-known brands in the graphics-card market isgh. 3Dfx, but its reputation is mainly in the niche market of gaming. The high volume OEM market is dominated by rivals ATi, S3 and Matrox.

The Banshee chipset from 3Dfx is the company's first attempt to carve a slice of this lucrative segment. The 3D Edge graphics card from Pace is built around the same chipset.

The Banshee has some similarities to the more famous 3D-only Voodoo2 card from 3Dfx. It has essentially the same rendering engine as the Voodoo2 but one of the two texturing engines is absent. This means that the Banshee cannot handle single-pass multitexturing. So, in games like Unreal and Quake 2 which use multitexturing, there will be a significant performance hit. Also, unlike the G200 from Matrox and the TNT from nVidia, the Banshee supports only AGP 1X.

It also lacks a full OpenGL ICD. Despite these obvious limitations, this Pace card is worth a look due to some extra features. In addition to 16Mb of SGRAM, it has a video-out port, which will be of interest to gamers. A copy of Wargasm is included.

The 3D Edge, despite its name, did not produce cutting edge performance. With a 3DMark99 benchmark test score of 1124, it's faster than the Matrox Millennium G200 but much slower than graphics cards based on the TNT chipset. And as the Banshee does not support 32-bit colour, picture quality is not quite top notch.

PCW DETAILS

Price: #99 (#84.26 ex VAT)

Contact: Pace 0990 561001, www.pace.co.uk

Good Points: Decent performance. TV-out.

Bad Points: No OpenGL ICD. Lacks 32-bit rendering. Does not support AGP 2X.

Conclusion: A graphics card that's let down by a chipset which lacks some crucial features.

See also:

Handspring Visor Edge

Handspring's latest Visor is slimmer and lighter than ever.  11 Apr 2002

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