Now onto our testing with FSAA enabled, this is how most people will be playing Quake 3, well, not really. We conducted a survey and most people told us that framerate is king in Quake3. They'd give up FSAA in Quake III just to get the extra edge by more frames. But in every other game, they would want FSAA always on. Going back to the issue of 2X and 4X FSAA, I compared screenshots of Nvidia's Anti Aliasing to 3dfx's hardware FSAA. The images of the scene with NVAA were equal to that of 3dfx's hardware 2X FSAA, not surprising as other reviewers had come to the same conclusion. The image quality of 4X FSAA isn't even touched in any of the screenshots taken on GeForce cards with AA enabled.

If you have played with Nvidia's AA, you would know that it gives a huge performance hit, so big it even justifies not using it. That's because the cards have no native hardware support for such a feature. The Voodoo5 5500 has hardware support for FSAA via its T-Buffer engine. So we would expect good framerates even with FSAA enabled. We tested Quake III at the normal settings just like we did in that benchmark above. We enabled the AA on the detonator drivers for OpenGL and ran the tests against the Voodoo5 with 2X FSAA and 4X FSAA. As you can see, 2X FSAA performs twice as good as the Nvidia's AA does, and 4X FSAA performs just about as good as NVAA. If you think I'm overdoing the FSAA thing, I'm not. If you ever played a game with AA, you would know that it's something worth writing an entire review about. The performance of FSAA is amazing to say the least. I would buy this card just for the FSAA and so would most of the other people who saw it in action. I've been playing games on this card with FSAA enabled and I'm constantly being amazed, by now I've gotten so attached to FSAA that I would not enjoy a game much without it. It does a fantastic job of clearing out the jaggies and marching ants were all so accustomed to seeing. For those of you who claim that FSAA is just blurring the image, you are dead wrong. If you're playing a game without FSAA and you see something in the background that you cannot quite make out because of the excessive jaggies, blurring it will make the jaggies go away but it will mess up the entire image, making it even harder to see the object in the background because it is now blurred. FSAA does not blur the image, it keeps it sharp while compensating for the visual artifacts that normally would hinder your gameplay. Although image quality of the Voodoo5 is fantastic without FSAA, you get spoiled fast with it on. Once you go FSAA, you never go back.

What better way to test Direct3D performance than with the industry standard Mad Onion 3D Mark 2000?

If you read below, you'll find out that there were some difficulties running 3D Mark 2000 and that only let me get away with one benchmark before it kept crashing out to the desktop. This is it, 16-bit at 1024x768. The GeForce demolishes the Voodoo5 in Direct3D it seems, not much else to say when it gets bested by 1000 points. All I can say is that the Direct3D drivers need some work.

Phew, that was a lot of testing. It all comes down to one key fact… the Voodoo5 5500 is fast, there is no doubt about it and once the Voodoo5 6000 comes out, that will be the fastest. I wish we had some T-Buffer games available so we could tell you first hand how those looked like but we don't because there don't seem to be any games yet that support it, thinking back, the FSAA was the only thing available for us to test aside from the card itself.

Keep in mind that this review was done using the retail version 1.0 drivers that 3dfx provided us. This can be a good thing because the benchmark results are what you would expect in the final shipping board but it's also a bad thing because it is a 1.0 driver. When was a 1.0 driver ever performance driven? You can expect scores to go up and stability to increase as 3dfx updates their drivers. The card only gets faster from here on with new drivers. I completely believe that if the drivers had more research and tweaks done in it, the Voodoo5 could be a lot faster.