One of these graphics cards (not pictured because the image has been lost - lame!) was an object of desire for a long time and cost me upwards of £200. The other I bought because I needed something that could decode DVDs in hardware. It cost £30.
One of these cards will only handle 3D graphics trickery and has 8MB of video RAM. The other handles desktop graphics, 3D graphics, DVD decoding and more, and comes with a massive 128MB of video RAM onboard.
One of these cards cannot handle much more than Quake very well (although some nutter got it running Doom 3). The other - well, I have no idea. It supports DirectX 9 in theory, but not in hardware, so in other words any DirectX 9 games will be functional but incredibly slow.
One of these cards has a connector on the top to allow you to marry it to another, identical card, doubling its effective power. The other card would outclass such a combination all by itself.
One card is such a cool customer its chips do not even require a heatsink, despite its high-end status when first released. Modern video cards, of course, require onboard fans, and in some cases, separate power connectors for them.
Which is which? The big one is, as you may have guessed (especially if you enlarge the image), the horribly outmoded Voodoo 2. Only seven years old and already a computing dinosaur. Sniff, sniff. You made Wing Commander Prophecy and all other Glide-centric games look beautiful, man. You’ll be sorely missed.
Its compact friend is the ATI Radeon 9250 - only £30 but it does so much more - and it made me relocate my other PCI cards to make room for its heatsink. Welcome to the new graphical age, liberator.
