After losing ground to NVidia with the Voodoo3, 3dfx is determined not to make the same mistakes as before. They have addressed a lot of complaints of the Voodoo3 and are determined not to lose more ground. Still, the Voodoo3 was the best selling card of last year but has since lost market share to the TNT2 Ultras and the GeForces. Aggressive pricing of the Voodoo5 and availability in many flavors should also help turn the tide. This time around, 3dfx will not face supply shortages. The Voodoo5 5000 PCI 32MB should be priced at around $229 and the Voodoo5 5500AGP should be priced at $299 although I saw it on pre-order at www.onvia.com for $249. With an anticipated arrival date of May 26, 2000 and no delays, the Voodoo5 should be hitting store shelves around week after you read this. This is good news to people who don't want to shell out $350 for a GeForce2 GTS or even $250 for the GeForce DDR. If the Voodoo5 5500 comes down to the DDR price point, it will be a VERY attractive buy for most people because of all the new features of the card and the speed of it in high resolution play (see benchmarks below).

When I got my production board with retail 1.0 drivers from 3dfx, I was pretty jazzed to say the least, I wanted to see if anything could beat the GeForce DDR and this was the chance. The Voodoo5 came in a promotional box that had the 3dfx logo and said, "coming soon". If you want to see the promotional box, go to your local CompUSA or Best Buy. Inside the box laid a smaller box that contained the actual card and a driver disk (3dfx sent me newer, final drivers afterwards). I took the card out of it's casing and admired it for a second and noticed that there was a lot of the PCB space not in use; I really didn't care as long as it fitted into my box. There were 4 6ns Toshiba SDRAM chips and the 2 VSA-100 chips with small HSF's on them. It's also a good time to note that this is the first card by 3dfx with active cooling. I remember getting burned by the Voodoo3 a couple of times but the Voodoo5 never got as close to the Voodoo3 in terms of temperature. Aside from that, it was just like the pre-production board we saw, down to the placement of the power supply connector. It had the standard VGA out but no S-Video out or Flat Panel outputs. Again, this can be attributed to keeping the price of the final card down.

Also included were the gold retail drivers version 1.0. So the benchmarks in this review should be exactly what you would expect in the Voodoo5 you pick up from Best Buy or Circuit City.

Full Scene Anti Aliasing is a popular topic in discussion on messageboards worldwide and I did a few searches and came up with claims such as "FSAA is amazing" to "FSAA makes no difference". All I have to remark is the people who say "FSAA makes no difference" has never seen it in action or they would not be making a mindless claim like that. Aliasing has been a problem we all learned to live with by constant exposure. All gamers have gotten used to seeing it in all their games and some might not even notice it. Aliasing is the under-sampling of source images so that they are displayed with, jagged, rough edges, and have the crawling "army ant" artifacts. You know what I'm talking about, the jaggies (stairs)! To get rid of these, the source image must be sampled over until the rough parts of the images are smoothed out. The VSA-100 engine in the Voodoo5 samples a frame pixel by pixel until it is visually pleasing to the eye. Aliasing is more apparent in older games because newer games have ways to make the sharp edges and all less apparent. Lets take Quake 3 Arena for example. At 640x480, this game looks better than other games running at the same resolution such as Falcon 4.0. Why is this so? Game developers have never had the option of hardware based Anti Aliasing available to them before so they compensated by using techniques that improved frame quality. Some of these techniques are dim lighting, low variations of colors (no red on white, black on green, etc.), and low detailed, blurry objects to minimize the crawling (army ant) artifacts. If you need to know more about the FSAA on board the VSA-100 processor, read the big FSAA section of the preview by clicking here.