3DFX: Dethroned
Written: Jun 09 '01
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Nice image quality. Great Anti-Aliasing support.
Cons: Not the fastest horse in the stable.
The Bottom Line: If you play flight simulators, you will LOVE the V5 5500's FSAA.
|
|
|
| don_nigera's Full Review: 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP |
Basic Overview
3DFX has always been a "biggy" of the high-end market, more often then not thrashing all other graphics cards with ease. As of late, they have been trying to push there own ideas, not listening to what the consumers have been wanting. This has led them to their sudden demise.
The Voodoo 5 5500 specs are as follows:
128-bit interface
32-bit rendering
32/24-bit Z & W Buffer
8 Bit stencil
Two single textured pixels per clock cycle
AGP 1x/2x/4x
NO AGP texturing support
64MB Total Memory
Hardware T-Buffer
Hardware FSAA
733MP Fill Rate
Installation
Of the 3DFX cards I have installed, including the Voodoo 5 5500, I don't recall any problems installing the cards at all. Driver installation was also smooth and straight forward.
There is a physical aspect of this card too, the card is so long it may not fit in your computer case! Being that it's AGP, if it doesn't fit right there, you basically wasted some of your money.
The Memory
The Voodoo 5 5500 has 64mb of memory, which is essentially two VSA-32mb's. Only 32mb of textures can actually be sent to the board at a time, making the extra 32mb almost worthless. Ofcourse, if the programmer would design for it, they could aptly use the extra 32mb.
Full-Screen-Anti-Aliasing
The FSAA is done by either rendering 2 or 4 frames at a time, and blending the frame together to achieve a smoother image. For each level of sampling you go up, you lose half the available fill-rate, usually halfing your FPS rate. At 4x FSAA, you are dragged down to about Voodoo 3 Performance.
However, a voodoo 3 can still play many of todays games just fine. The games you should be leaning towards if you do buy a V5 5500 would be those of a flight simulator or racing game, where jaggies can be disturbing.
T-Buffer
These are some cool effects that have not been implemented by anything, and most likely never will. Some of the effects include blur, shadowing, and reflections. Seeing as nothing today actually uses these, I will not further explain this.
Everyday performance
The card performed acceptably with no real problems. The images are usually crisp and clear, with nice text support.
Gaming Performance
The performance in games is somewhat close to the original GeForce, or a GeForce 256 DDR. By today's standards, this is still fast, but quite slow in comparison to other boards that are out.
Benchmarks
Quake 3
1024x768x32
The Voodoo 5 can sustain about 40-65fps, just as the GeForce 256 DDR can. So it's not a bad performer in the Quake 3 area.
Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament is actually written for 3DFX boards, so ofcourse the V5 5500 will be able to perform well. The V5 performs on-par with the GeForce 2 GTS, and beating it in 1280x1024. In 1024x768, the game is very playable with anything above a P3 CPU.
Tribes 2
If you are a Tribes 2 player, I would highly NOT recommend this card. The V5 5500 just can't keep up with other cards, mainly due to the lack of AGP texturing, and no T&L Unit.
Racing Games
If you only play racing games, the V5 5500 would be utterly perfect for you. The FSAA would help image quality a lot in your little racing games, and you wouldn't be disappointed by it's performance. Although I would recommend a ATI Radeon 32mb or 64mb over the V5 5500.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 135.00
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
don_nigera
|
|
Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.