Voodoo 5 In House PREview

Voodoo 5 In House PREview - Page 3

 
As you will note, we did test the V5-5500 on several motherboard platforms.  Our main test bed was a fairly high end P3-866/RAMBUS combo but we also will show you a few scores on an Athlon/KX133 board as well as Intel's BX chipset.  So, without further rambling, let's dive right in!

The 3dfx Voodoo 5 5500 AGP
An "In House" PREview and Test Of Alpha 2 Product

By Dave "Davo" Altavilla
4/24/00

Hot Hardware's Test Systems For The Voodoo5-5500
Multi-Platform

Full Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium III 866EB or K7 Athlon 750,  Soyo SY-6ICA i820 Motherboard also Soyo SY-6BA+IV BX and Abit KA7 KX133 Athlon Motherboards 128MB of  800MHz (400MHz. DDR) Techworks  RDRAM or 128MB of Corsair PC133 Memory provided by PCNut, WD Expert AC418000 7200 RPM ATA66 Hard Drive, 3dfx Voodoo5-5500 AGP w/ 64MB of SDRAM , Kenwood 72X CDROM,
3dfx Voodoo5 Drivers Version 4.12.01.0532 4/16/00,
Win 98SE, DirectX 7.0a


 

Benchmarks with the Voodoo5-5500
Fast?  Uhh, yeah....
 
First, let's give you a snapshot of the general performance of the Voodoo5 overall.  We tested the board without FSAA enabled in the following test, so that you can make a comparison to a GeForce or other card in this area.

Mad Onion's - 3DMark 2000
Click image

These scores were taken on the i820/RAMBUS system.  This is impressive performance when you compare these scores to a GeForce without T&L enabled in the this test. Also, these are promising considering the current pre-release status of the product.

V5-5500 Quake3 Arena Versus A GeForce DDR

Now, what do you think we took scores with?  Quake 3 by chance?  Nawww, say it isn't so! 


Above you are looking at 16 bit color scores versus a GeForce 32MB DDR card.  These were taken on the i820/RAMBUS system.  In the top graph, scores were taken without FSAA and then with FSAA in the bottom.  Except for low resolutions without FSAA, the Voodoo5 beats a GeForce DDR handily.  These tests were all taken with textures set to max resolution in the game.

Here are the 32bit scores versus a GeForce DDR with and without FSAA.  Again, we used the 5.13 reference drivers to enable FSAA on the GeForce.

From the image quality tests we saw in the previous pages, I would say 2X FSAA is roughly on par or maybe even better than NVidia's current FSAA solution.  Things may change with the GeForce2 but for now the Voodoo5 is looking great and scoring fairly well for pre-release product. 4X FSAA at 800X600 in 32 bit color is playable.  Remember, the textures are set to maximum here so additonal gains can be had by turning them down slighty. 2X FSAA is fast and looks great too. 

Remember we said the V5 can overclock?  Well, we were able to get to 175MHz. stable and here are the results with 4X FSAA.

 

 
Unreal Tournament, the BX Motherboard and Athlon Tests

 

 

Tags:  Pre, House, voodoo, preview, review, view, IE

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