3dfx Voodoo5 5500

As I said earlier, the Voodoo5 5500 comes with Dual 166MHz VSA-100 processors. A different potion of each frame is processed individually by each VSA-100 in parallel with the other. These individual potions are combined to make up what is finally displayed. The card fully supports 16 bit & 32-bit rendering and has increased texture sizes of 2Kx2K(improvement from 256×256). Aavid fan sinks cools the two processors. Each VSA-100 has it’s own 32 MB’s of Samsung SDRAM that gives a total of 64 Mega Bytes and is rated at 6ns.

The VSA-100 processor is capable of processing two pixels per clock with one texture per pixel or one pixel per clock with two textures per pixel. This gives the Voodoo5 5500 AGP a theoretical 667Mpps (million pixels per second) fill-rate and a theoretical 667 Mtps (million texels per second) rate. This value is not that stunning compared to NVIDIA`s Geforce 2 GTS which has a maximum fill-rate of 800 Mpps.

The battle between NVIDIA and 3dfx for supremacy in the high-end 3D market has been in terms of the technology used by each manufacturer. While 3dfx has used the scaleable chip architecture with a comparatively simple design NVIDIA has gone in for a single chip solution with high-speed memory. While NVIDIA has been using the faster DDR SDRAM for two generations of it’s cards now, it’s probably a big question to many why 3dfx still uses slower RAM. Well the fact is, the GeForce2 and most current top-end accelerators run into a big problem of being restricted by memory bandwidth. Though NVIDIA uses the fastest available external RAM, there’s a bottleneck in the information flow from local memory to the graphics processor. Therefore it is impossible to reap the maximum rendering potential of the chip. But with the Voodoo5 5500, each VSA-100 chip has it’s own 128-bit pipe to the local memory and thus the cheaper SDR memory is used to match the bandwidth of the GeForce 2’s bandwidth. The Voodoo5 6000, which sports 4 processors, will have a greater bandwidth in the range of 10GB/s and will give a much higher throughput. But the scalable architecture is not so rosy itself. To double the bandwidth, the double the amount of resources are needed which invariably leads to double the costs. The Voodoo5 6000 will be priced around $600 and will be a very costly high-end graphics card.