A few weeks ago I decided that it was time to do a graphics card upgrade from my very reliable Creative Riva TNT2. All my games had worked with this card, and I innocently thought that anything available on the market would also work, only with fabulous improved frames per second at higher resolutions. How naive I was.
I first bought a Creative GeForce 2, and found a fair number of games would lock up or play inconsistently. OK, maybe the drivers were not up to date for some of my legacy games with this cutting edge version. I took it back thinking maybe a more mainstream card might do, like a less powerful Creative GeForce MX2. Same problems. OK, next I tried a completely different chip with the ATI Radeon 64. Much better compatibility but still squirrelly behavior in some older games. I was getting tired of the CompUSA return lines. I decided to try a Voodoo 4 at Best Buys, recognizing that Tom's Hardware had written Voodoos off as too much money for too little performance. (I had had a Voodoo2 when it was cutting edge, which worked well.) Lo and behold, the Voodoo4 has shown absolutely perfect compatibility with every single new or old game I play. On the box, STB brags that this card would work with every title on the market, and they proved it to me.
Then came the bad news of their corporate demise. For now I can live with the Voodoo 4, but what is in the future where other vendors obviously are not investing the time to work out compatibility with legacy titles? And a Voodoo 5 does not work in the Pentium 4 world. What to do?
I first bought a Creative GeForce 2, and found a fair number of games would lock up or play inconsistently. OK, maybe the drivers were not up to date for some of my legacy games with this cutting edge version. I took it back thinking maybe a more mainstream card might do, like a less powerful Creative GeForce MX2. Same problems. OK, next I tried a completely different chip with the ATI Radeon 64. Much better compatibility but still squirrelly behavior in some older games. I was getting tired of the CompUSA return lines. I decided to try a Voodoo 4 at Best Buys, recognizing that Tom's Hardware had written Voodoos off as too much money for too little performance. (I had had a Voodoo2 when it was cutting edge, which worked well.) Lo and behold, the Voodoo4 has shown absolutely perfect compatibility with every single new or old game I play. On the box, STB brags that this card would work with every title on the market, and they proved it to me.
Then came the bad news of their corporate demise. For now I can live with the Voodoo 4, but what is in the future where other vendors obviously are not investing the time to work out compatibility with legacy titles? And a Voodoo 5 does not work in the Pentium 4 world. What to do?
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