A RECENT announcement by respected graphics card manufacturer 3dfx neatly illustrated the frightening pace of change in the 3-D accelerator market.

The US company which, until recently, could do no wrong in the market for add-in graphics cards may drop the name Voodoo from its products.

The reason? It reckons a forthcoming card is so dramatically different that calling it a Voodoo card will be to saddle it with a moniker forever associated with yesterday's technology.

All of which must come as heartening news for anyone who has just invested in a Voodoo 5 graphics card which currently costs £249 - just £50 less than a Sony PlayStation 2.

The fact that 3dfx already has a replacement underway for a card that has just gone on sale in this country points to the ridiculous state of the market at the moment.

The ultimate Voodoo 5 card - due out shortly - will have more random access memory on its one board (128MB) than many desktop PCs have in total. It's so big that some smaller cases won't be able to physically accommodate it and the power requirements are so hefty that it needs its own supply, simply sucking juice through the AGP (advanced graphics port) isn't enough.

Of course, the 3dfx Voodoo range is a tremendous graphics accelerator card but, amazingly, it isn't the gamers' choice.

That honour falls to the GeForce 2 made by nVidia, an ambitious Far Eastern manufacturer which has taken the market by storm in the last 12 months.

GeForce 2 chips are licensed to companies across the world. That's why your local store probably has half-a-dozen GeForce boards in stock. All of them are roughly the same, so it's a case of choose the card with the lowest price. Do keep an eye out for a board with DDR (Double Data Rate) memory, though, as these are the best of all.

The nVidia boards have all the features of the Voodoo 5 plus hardware transform and lighting - a clever way of taking the graphics load off your PCs processor and transferring it to the board. This leaves the CPU free to do other things and, in theory, dramatically increases performance. A game that uses T&L will run faster and look better on a GeForce 2 board.

No wonder the next 3dfx product will have a T&L implementation - no matter what it is called.

The GeForce 2 has been king of the hill for about three months now, but its reign looks to have been short lived.

The new boss card could well be a new product from an old name: the ATI Radeon.

Although it sounds like a washing powder, the Radeon has been turning in some pretty impressive benchmark scores in recent weeks.

It has 64MB of DDR memory, hardware T&L, full scene anti-aliasing (although frame rates take a big hit when this is switched on) and a host of unique tricks to make the most of any gamer's collection.

It can even play back DVDs and capture full motion video at 25fps - something no other rival can boast.

A Radeon board will cost around £249 and for gamers on the cutting edge it's probably the best bet this autumn.

Of course today's champ is tomorrow's also ran. That's good news for the rest of us because it means a raft of perfectly decent graphics cards selling for very low prices.

If you want a decent gaming rig but don't want to spend a fortune, track down a Voodoo 3 or an nVidia TNT 2 card. For less than £100 they offer a much more sensible way to computer gaming enjoyment.