Voodoo 2
8 mb or 12 mb voodoo 2?
An 8mb v2 has 2 mb of texture memory on each TMU. That is not as general
as the current 6mb v1 cards that have 4 mb of texture memory on a single
TMU. To use the multitexture capability, textures are restricted to
being on one or the other TMU (simplifying a bit here). There is some
benefit over only having 2 mb of memory, but it isn’t double. You will
see more texture swapping in quake on an 8mb voodoo 2 than you would
on a 6mb voodoo 1. However, the texture swapping is several times faster,
so it isn’t necessarily all that bad.
If you use the 8 bit palettized textures, there will probably not be any
noticable speed improvement with a 12 mb voodoo 2 vs an 8 mb one. The
situation that would most stress it would be an active deathmatch that
had players using every skin. You might see a difference there.
A game that uses multitexture and 16 bit textures for everything
will stress a 4/2/2 voodoo layout. Several of the Quake engine licensees
are using full 16 bit textures, and should perform better on a 4/4/4 card.
The differences probably won’t show as significant on timedemo numbers,
but they will be felt as little one frame hitches here and there.