3dfx Voodoo 5 5500: Debunking Myths
Written: Jun 13 '00 (Updated Nov 26 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Blazing fast performance, Best anti-aliasing available
Cons: Outperformed by Geforce 2, Generates lots of heat
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| vicwang's Full Review: 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP |
It's amazing just how much Voodoo 5 misinformation is out there. First there's the plethora of "fake reviews" here at Epinions, many of which were posted before the V5 was even released, all of them making outrageous claims as to its ungodly performance (most of them untrue, to no surprise). Then there's the anti-3dfx, nVidia-loyalist camp, who have gone around the 'net criticizing the V5 of everything from its two-chip design to its power consumption, stopping just short of depicting the V5 as the sloppiest engineering job of all time (note I'm not referring to my fellow Epinions reviewers, but rather certain individuals who have gone around posting misinformation around the web) Then, adding even more fuel to the fire, are 3dfx and nVidia themselves, making various outrageous claims that are also little more than propaganda and spin-mongering.
Note that this isn't intended to be a comprehensive review since
1) I don't own the V5, have never used it, and have never even seen one in real life
2) Excellent reviews have already been written on the subject, many of which are both comprehensive and provide first-hand accounts of the Voodoo 5.
What I will do is attempt to debunk some of the most common misconceptions that have been circulating about this card, and hopefully lay some of them to rest.
"3dfx was too lazy to design a single-chip solution, so they just took two Voodoo 3 cards and slapped them together onto one board..."
With their current generation of graphics cards, 3dfx has used a "scalable" architecture, which allows for up to 32 graphics processors to be integrated onto a single graphics card. This is in stark contrast to their competitors, who have focused on single-processor cards (with a few exceptions). As a result of taking the "scalable" approach, 3dfx has received a good deal of flack for taking the "lazy" approach in many people's eyes. They couldn't innovate and design a competitive chip, so why not just slap together many weak chips to make a powerful graphics card?
Common sense would seem to support such a notion, and it's a natural assumption to make for non-electrical engineers like you and me. After all, the card is MASSIVE, almost twice the size of two complete 3D cards in one. It contains two graphics chips instead of one. And it contains 64 megs of RAM, instead of 32 megs. Interestingly though, according to experts in the chip design field, designing scalable multi-chip video solutions such as the VSA-100 chip (the chip used on the Voodoo 5) is extremely, extremely difficult from an engineering standpoint--far more difficult than designing a similar chip that is not scalable. That's why we have seen only two dual-chip solutions to date (the Voodoo 2 and the Rage 128 MAXX) and zero quad-chip solutions, with the exception of certain workstation-class graphics cards.
UPDATE 11/15: Looks like we still won't be seeing a quad-chip consumer card. 3dfx released a press release today revealing that the quad-chip Voodoo 5 6000 has been cancelled, at least in its original form. They have licensed the technology for a four-processor board to Quantum, who will basically manufacture the V5 6000 as a workstation card. It will not be available through retail.
"The Voodoo 5 5500 has 64 megs of RAM, but everything is duplicated twice so it's the same as if it had 32 megs."
Not quite. There are two things that consume video RAM: textures (the 2D bitmaps that get applied to polygons to make them look "real") and frame-buffer (where the actual images displayed to your screen are stored right before they're sent to the monitor). The Voodoo 5 must duplicate textures for each chip, but the frame-buffer is shared. So how much difference does that make? Well let's do some quick calculations. If you're playing at 1024x768 resolution with 4X anti-aliasing and 32-bit color depth:
1. 1024 x 768 = 786,432 total pixels
2. 786,432 x 32 bits per pixel = 25,165,824 bits per frame
3. 25,165,824 bits / 8,000,000 = Approximately 3 megabytes per frame
4. 3 x 4 (quad-sampled anti-aliasing) = 12 megabytes per frame
5. 12 x 2 (double-buffering) = 24 megabytes
So in this theoretical example, the frame-buffer alone takes up 24 megs, leaving you with 40 megs to store textures--effectively 20 megs since textures are duplicated. If the frame-buffer were not shared and the V5 5500 really did "duplicate everything" you'd be looking at a pretty horrible situation--16 megs free, effectively 8 megs. Thankfully, they didn't design it that way or the V5 would have been a disaster.
"The Geforce 2 uses DDR (double data rate) RAM instead of the SDR (single data rate) RAM on the Voodoo 5, so the reason the Geforce 2 is faster is that it's RAM is twice as fast."
Another common and understandable misconception. The #1 performance-limiting bottleneck in 3D cards is memory bandwidth (just how fast it can swap textures and images in and out of RAM) so it would seem that the Geforce2, with RAM that's about TWICE as fast as the V5, is faster because of more memory bandwidth. What that doesn't take into consideration, though, is that each of the V5 5500's VSA-100 processors has its own direct path to its "set" of 32 megs. So you have two channels to single-speed RAM, instead of one channel to double-speed RAM, which are essentially identical in terms of performance. Of course, the benefit of using single-speed RAM is that plain ol' SDR RAM is cheaper and more plentiful than DDR RAM. Interestingly, I've heard that two single-speed channels with separate processors (like the V5 5500) can actually be more effective. According to The Register:
"Because the chips are programmable, they can be allocated individually to process explicit parts of the screen which means one can handle a particularly graphics intensive area while the other can continue to run the rest of the screen."
The point is, the Geforce 2 is faster than the V5 5500 because it has a more powerful processor core, and is in many ways a more powerful card, period--not because of the difference in RAM speeds, which for all intents and purposes can be considered equal.
"The Voodoo 5 supports software T&L (transform & lighting)... The Geforce 2 has hardware T&L, which can actually reduce the lifespan of a 3D card."
Straight from the mouth of 3dfx Chief Technology Officer Gary Tarolli, this is spin-mongering at its very worst and an example of just how much 3dfx's has changed since they were the cutting-edge leader of the 3D card industry. Yep, the "good guys" at 3dfx, historically dominated by a culture of hard-core gamers like you and I who have never needed to resort to "propaganda" or "mud-slinging", are now no better than the Microsofts and Rambuses of the world when it comes to spewing out manipulative doublespeak. Am I being a little hard on them? Perhaps, but it's interesting that over the course of the last six months the 3dfx PR department has continued to progressively (regressively?) go into the gutter in terms of honesty and respectability, just as the company has continued to lose market share and the performance-lead in the industry. Coincidence? Not likely.
As for "software T&L", believe it or not, the Voodoo 3 had "software T&L" also. For that matter, so did the most pathetic joke of a 3D card ever, the S3 Virge. And remember those ISA 386 video cards that had something like 256k of RAM? Those had software T&L too!! All kidding aside, software T&L is exactly what has always been used for transform and lighting, since no cards had HARDWARE support for it. In other words, your CPU has always had to handle it, instead of the graphics card.
GeForce cards, however, can use hardware T&L and off-load those processes to the graphics card for games that support it (currently just a handful). Gary Tarolli's "logic" is a twisted version of what I myself said in my "3dfx vs nVidia" article ( http://www.epinions.com/cmd-review-2404-7B4DDB8-38EFC38B-prod6 ): that faster CPU's will eventually reduce the performance benefits of T&L, since extremely fast CPU's can do T&L as fast as, or faster than, current hardware T&L processors. Tarolli has somehow twisted that to imply that, if the CPU got fast enough, hardware T&L would eventually become a liability. Maybe if you have a 2 gigahertz CPU and a Geforce with a T&L unit that *can't be turned off* that would be the case. Of course, it can be turned off--in a sense it already is "off" for 99% of the games out there.
UPDATE: the newest Voodoo 5 drivers apparently have an option to enable software T&L, as if it's some kind of special feature. Of course, that's also terribly misleading, because it is literally impossible to have a 3D graphics card with software T&L somehow "disabled". You would simply have a blank screen if that were the case. The truth is, enabling it with the newest drivers implements additional 3DNow and SSE optimizations, improving performance with Duron, Athlon, PIII, and Celeron II systems. It really has no relationship to hardware T&L except for the name, which is obviously quite convenient for 3dfx (not to mention confusing for their end users).
"The (Voodoo 5/Geforce 2) is capable of Toy Story-quality graphics."
Anybody who truly believes that should read the following article at Maximum PC entitled "nVidia Makes Bold Claim, Gets Ass Handed Back": http://www.maximumpc.com/content/2000/05/26/11427
The gist: top-of-the-line 3D cards would need to become about ONE-MILLION times more powerful to even approach Toy Story-quality graphics. In 10-15 years, maybe.
"The V5 5500 is capable of over 200 frames per second at 2048x1536 resolution!!!!!"
I'm not even going to touch this one ;-).
NOTE: As Turin has pointed out, many users of the V5 5500 are not installing the correct driver, and are getting horrible performance as a result. See Comments for more details.
Thanks to the following sites for the information in this review: Penstar Systems, Tom's Hardware Page, Firing Squad, The Register, Voodoo Extreme, Beyond 3D, Maximum PC.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): N/A
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Epinions.com ID:
vicwang
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Member: Vic Wang
Location: Texas
Reviews written: 45
Trusted by: 216 members
About Me:
Systems Analyst and all-around computer guru who's always keeping up with the latest technology.
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