Voodoo5 5500 - Not gettin' Jaggy with it
Written: Aug 29 '00
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: FSAA, only card to have it.
Cons: Bit expensive, nothing else really stands out
|
|
|
| thepanther's Full Review: 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP |
The voodoo 5 5500 an eagerly awaited card my many gamers accross the world, so is it any good? well benchmarks show that it certainly has potential in the speed market with its multiple processor layout, but does it have the same features as before or are we going to have some newer ones. Well here it is, this is what we can expect to see from the latest release of 3Dfx.
First things first we have to mention what 3Dfx is shouting about that is FSAA (full screen Anti-Aliasing) this is a technology that allows the graphics card to perform smoothing of on screen images before they are displayed on the monitor. This technology has been played with before but a video card has never been quick enough to handle this advanced operation before. You get no more jagged edges and flickers from textures. This is a very good feature as previous cards (I have noticed this with Nvidia alot) tend to cause graphic anominalys with many of my favourite games, such as Half-life. The Voodoo 5 5500 has a twin processor setup which gives the card the extra power needed to perform such an advanced task as FSAA.
Beyond that though the card has a lot more to offer than the voodoo 3 ever had. firstly it comes with a massive 64Mb of RAM which is as much as most systems carry. The latest games which have larger texture sizes started to use system RAM in order to store textures. This meant that the card was using the AGP bus (reletivly slow) to transfer data. With 64Mb RAM this tends not to happen. The RAMDAC is 350 Mhz pretty standard for a high end card. 3Dfx Quote a fill rate of 733 Megapixles per second, not bad by anyones standard. I think you will be able to play games in 1024x768 now.
3dfx have also included what they call a T-buffer this buffer is used for special effects in photos and drawings such things as motion blur, shaodows and reflections, something that a raytracer program normally does, The voodoo 5 5500 makes this process alot quicker.
Now 3Dfx have finally made a card that supports 32bit color, there website claims that you can use the best quality textures with the 32 bit color, this is true but its been available for ages and 3dfx have been miles behind in including this feature into their graphics boards.
They include drivers for Glide (which is the fastest API out there at all at the moment, unfortunately games manufacturers are starting to neglect glide in favour of open GL and Direct X now) Direct X and Open GL. so the card is supported by every game on the market but it only comes with these drivers for Windows 95 and 98. So again Windows 2000 users have to sit and wait. I cant see it being long though before they start to make the drivers for 2000. Bad business move if they don't.
Not looking bad at all this card, will be a market contender, but as I say in my graphic card reviews my personal opinion is to wait for the Radeon from ATI should be a lightning bolt in graphic terms. Also Nvidia are releasing the Geforce 2 Ultra with a 460Mhz core speed, now thats fast.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
thepanther
|
|
Member: Stevie Orgill
Location: Burton-on-Trent, DerbyShire, UK
Reviews written: 65
Trusted by: 13 members
About Me:
Passing on my own experience from my business in Computer Hardware.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.