3dfx Voodoo5 5500
Test rig
- AMD Athlon 800MHz
- Gigabyte GA-7IX AMD 751 Motherboard
- 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 64MB SDR RAM (166/166MHz) -Detonator 1.00.01
- 128MB HSDRAM Memory
- Western Digital Expert 18.1GB DMA/66
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live!
The challengers
- ASUS V7700 GeForce 2 GTS 32MB DDR (200/332MHz) – Detonator 5.22
- HERCULES 3D Prophet II GTS 32MB DDR (200/333MHz) – Detonator 5.22
- ELSA GLADIAC 32MB DDR (200/332MHz) – Detonator 5.22
Under these settings the cards with the higher fill rate come out as winners. Since the problems associated with bandwidth limitation are not present at these settings the GeForce 2 cards out perform the Voodoo 5.
Note-For Normal Quality we used 16Bit resolutions.
Under these settings we see the performance of all the cards being affected considerably, especially at higher resolutions since the bandwidth requirement for better quality images is high. The Voodoo5 does manage to narrow the gap between the leaders and itself at the higher resolutions but it’s still lagging behind the GeForce 2 GTS cards.
Note -For High Quality we used 32 Bit resolutions.
As the results show the Voodoo5 still looses to the Geforce2 cards even at high resolutions and gets it’s ass kicked real bad at lower resolutions. Seems to me the much hyped about bandwidth Problems even affect the Voodoo5.
Note -For Max Quality we used 32 Bit resolutions.
What better way than WinBench2000 to compare the performance of cards, with and without Transform & Lightning (T&L) support? Obviously the Geforce 2 cards come out as winners here, and there’s a lot of interest brewed up in this area. We’ll see most new games that are been currently developed using this feature for better quality. Hmmm what has 3dfx to say to that?
Quake III FSAA Performance
As the benchmarks show, FSAA has very high toll on the performance of the game. Especially on 4X FSAA. Nobody who sees these values will opt for FSAA at 32-Bit High quality resolution. I know I wont. Considering the fact that I’m already running 32-bit color rendering and textures the price to pay for slightly better image quality is too high.
