I got 3 computers with a different 3d card inside. Ones got an rather new card called Voodoo 3. The others use a TNT2 M64 and GEforce. All these video cards are 32 mg. I found that on the TNT2 and GF there is a significant difference to their performance and stability.
First thing ot note down is that the TNT2 M64, is the worst card of all of them (I’m not saying that its the worst tho.) I play CS and it runs very smoothly on OpenGL mode and D3D mode in 1024x786. Now thats a good price for a card especially when your low on cash. I recommend Buying the TNT2 M64 (about $160 - $180).
The GF is a crazy little bugger. It runs 3 times as fast as the TNT2 (somewhat around 3 times as fast.) and runs up to about 1600 res with no noticable frame rates. In other words, its ****ING FAST! One of the low down is that the GL driver for the GF is very unstable especially at that kind of speed. I have encountered repeated HD caching which did piss me off a bit. D3D with this card is crap. Though it runs as fast as the GL driver its not as good with heaps of weird graphical garbage and multiply slowdowns.
The voodoo 3 how ever is probably the best. The graphics are twice as good and the speed, though not any faster it certainly hold a very stable code preventing it from locking up or anything that will try to crash it. Running in Mini GL is the best thing that has happend to me. I play diablo 2 and it looks heaps better than running it in D3D. Trust me you will want the V3.
For those who find that you computer keep locking up from time to time in your ‘accelerated mode’ then you might want to consider this. All video cards have a bus speed limit. Some motherboards arn’t able to control the bus speed fir PCI or AGP. Thus if your Bus speed is faster than your video cards bus speed and the computer is unable to control it, you might want to slow the bus speed down. Some mother boards may have a bios system that allows you to change the speed with out needing to go into your computer. Others may have some jumper switch that will be able to slow the speed down to a certain level. I haven’t tried this myself but i did red this in a hardware article. So i’m not certain about it.
-l8r guys