As the battle between the two titans of the graphics accelerator industry continues, we are enjoying the fruits of their labors. When we say the two titans we most certainly mean 3dfx and nVidia. Technology has never moved this fast since the beginning of the Intel/AMD war. It's true, in almost every case of industry rivalries, there are always 2 that stand out from the rest - a champion and challenger. AMD and Intel for desktop processors, Western Digital and Maxtor for consumer/cheap hard drives, and the list goes on and on. We can't say that this a bad thing, if there is competition for leadership, there will be better, cheaper products because of it. This can be applied to 3dfx's current race with Nvidia. Although prices are not dropping on new products, speed and features are going up. If you remember a few weeks ago, we posted a Voodoo5 5500 preview after our visit to a 3dfx office here in Texas. This review is the successor of that preview, we will address some of the things we theorized on in the preview and we will introduce you to all the things Voodoo that we haven't mentioned in the preview. That's why this will not be a SUPER long review, the 10 page preview covered such things as FSAA and T-Buffer effects so we don't have to re write it on the review, thank god for previews =).

The Voodoo 5 5500 AGP is 3dfx's newest 3D accelerator and it has a lot of potential and expectations to fulfill. With gaming becoming more realistic than ever, hardware support is not a commodity, it's a necessity. To me it seems that 3dfx has altered their philosophy lately. When the Voodoo3 was released, 3dfx wanted speed, speed, and more speed. Remember, "framerate is king"? With that thought, 3dfx excluded high resolution textures and 32-bit rendering from their Voodoo3, along with many other things. This hit a big nerve with reviewers and gamers alike. It was NVidia fans' best knock for 3dfx fans. While some people disputed the quality increase from 16 to 32-bit's, others said it made the world of difference. This is still an opinion question that will never end. 16-bits equaled faster rendering and that's what mattered to 3dfx. Now, it seems that quality has taken a new priority to 3dfx. The Voodoo5 5500 AGP is loaded with features that enhance visual quality and speed alike. What is advertised most with the Voodoo5 is FSAA, or should I say the critically acclaimed FSAA?

It's true that 3dfx is stressing FSAA as the highlight of the Voodoo4/5, and for good reason. It is something that a gamer shouldn't play without after being experienced first hand. Some of you might be thinking that 640x480 with FSAA is the best it gets but that's not true. 1024x768x16 with FSAA is also possible as I saw 3dfx demos with FSAA at 1024x768; the key is the higher the resolution, the better it looks with AA. The other thing is the entirely new VSA-100 chip, contrary to some popular belief, the VSA-100 is not an upgraded Voodoo3 chip, it's been entirely redesigned to be able to support many new features… especially T-Buffer, FSAA, SLI, etc… Did I mention it's also a heck of a lot faster?

Specs

• Fully Integrated 128-bit 2D/3D/Video Accelerator
• 667 Megapixels/second fillrate
• 64MB Onboard SDRAM
• 32-bit color rendering
• Real-Time Full-Scene Hardware Anti-Aliasing
• Exclusive T-Buffer Digital Cinematic Effects
• 3dfx FXT1 and DirectX Texture Compression
• 2000 x 2000 Textures
• AGP with full Sideband support
• 350 MHZ RAMDAC
• Windows 95, 98, NT 4, 2000 drivers
• 1/2/4x AGP Support
• Scalability
• Dual Pixel Pipeline: 2-pixels/clock (single texture), 2 textures/clock (single pixel)
• Fully software compatible with 3dfx Voodoo3

• 32 chip SLI mode
• 333 megatexel/megapixel to 3+ gigapixel fillrate
• 4-64MB RAM per chip
• 32-bit RBGA Support
• 24-bit Z-Buffer; 8-bit Stencil Buffer
• 2048 x 2048 texture support
• New color and texture combine modes
• Patented single pass, single cycle multitexturing
• Palletized texture support
• DVD Hardware Assist
• Full 128-bit 2D and video engines
• 14 million transistors
• Manufactured with tried and true .25 micron, 6 layer metal process
• Support for all major API's
• Highest software compatibility
• 60 FPS + at high resolutions
• Designed for optimal performance on all major processors

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.

You might know by now that NVidia cards now support Anti Aliasing with the latest 5.xx drivers. You might also know that this takes a big performance hit and is done in software mode on the GeForce while oversampling is done in partly hardware in the GF2 while the Voodoo5 FSAA is done in hardware. 3dfx claims that it's 4X FSAA is in a class of it's own and the 2X FSAA is comparable to their competitor's FSAA because of the special algorithms in the VSA-100 chip combined with the methods of Anti Aliasing the card uses. We will investigate this further and include this in a future article..

3dfx quote: "We believe strongly that FSAA is something that no graphics card should be without"

2 processors at 166MHz at 2 pixels per clock, pumping out 667-733 MP/S fillrate. That's impressive. But not so impressive when you combine FSAA into the equation. Yes, 667 megapixels/sec is more than any other card available today aside from the GF2 but lets see how much FSAA will reduce it to. On 2X sample FSAA, the frame is sampled twice to reduce the jaggies. So with 2X FSAA, it takes twice as long to render a frame and with 4X FSAA, it takes 4 times as long. This can be calculated easily.

667 / 2 = 333 Megapixels/second. Still pretty fast 667 / 4 = 166 Megapixels/second. Not so fast. Yes, there is a large performance hit, even if it is done in hardware. 3dfx doesn't try to cover up this fact either, it's well known that FSAA will tax your video card but are the effects worth it? Maybe in low resolutions but don't think of playing Quake at 1024s768x32 with 4X FSAA anytime soon with good framerates. For more information on fillrate, please read the preview.

Large textures are great, when studying a highly detailed wall in Quake 3 I could make out everything, even the small eyes of a demon. This is the advantage of having larger textures. Highly detailed textures can be stored and rendered in the Voodoo5 because 3dfx has finally upped the texture size to 2048x2048 from the lowly 256x256 of the Voodoo3. I went back to my Voodoo3 for a while to see what the same wall looked like and I could not make anything on that wall out because of the restrictions in size. Another stab from 3dfx to make games more realistic. Now lets go onto Texture Compression and the T-Buffer.

Cinematic effects galore in the VSA-100! There is a lot of information on the T-Buffer and how it works in the preview but I will restate the important facts here for you lazy guys. Realism is a key factor in producing the new Voodoo cards. That has led 3dfx to develop the T-Buffer. Essentially, the T-Buffer is a collection of cinematic effects in which FSAA is a part of. But FSAA is the only effect that is available on all games out of the box. The other effects such as soft shadows, motion blur, reflections, and depth of field must be applied into future games by the developers. Although the strive to achieve realistic gameplay is admirable, even 3dfx admits that games will not be as realistic as movies such as "A Bug's Life" anytime soon. Below is a summary of each effect taken from the preview I wrote:

Hmm, now this is sounding like a preview instead of a review, ok, enough of the introductional stuff, now onto experiences and benchmarks!

The key to an easy installation of the board is to move all your IDE, power, and sound cables out of the way to make room for this ¾ length AGP card. After that, it's just like any other AGP card. Insert into AGP port, and plug into power supply. The familiar Voodoo3 installation procedure is back in the Voodoo5, install drivers before installing the card. After the drivers were in place, I shut down the computer, inserted the Voodoo5 and rebooted to a perfectly normal desktop. Of course the first thing I had to do was tinker in the 3dfx Tools panel.

The all-familiar Tools panel is present in the Voodoo5, this time as an icon on the taskbar. The placement is great because one double click on the taskbar icon will bring you directly to the tabbed tools menu with the FSAA tab preselected. You can set your FSAA settings in one double click, can't be easier. Also, it gives you access to quick resolution changing and weblinks. All the standard features are in the Tools menu such as color adjustment, advanced features, info… but what we haven't seen before that became standard was an overclock menu. Yep, that's right, it seems that 3dfx is finally realizing that people will overclock their cards no matter what they say about it. The overclock panel is disabled by default because of Microsoft WHQL regulations, but can be enabled through the registry or a patch downloadable through 3dfx's website. They also stress that overclocking can damage your system and all of that other legal stuff.

Having fun with the Voodoo5, I tried out a couple things to stress it out such as running a timedemo at 1600x1200x32. It was a stable card and performed great. Temperatures were nowhere close to the temperatures the Voodoo3 reached thanks to active cooling. I would expect a card that draws power directly from the power supply to get really hot but it wasn't the case this time. After running the demos, I reached out and touched the PCB. It was surprising warm enough to touch. The 2D is great on the Voodoo5, noticeably better than the GeForce; the text on the screen appeared sharp even at 1600x1200. The 350MHz RAMDAC lets you run at very high refresh rates and resolutions. Video acceleration is present but in the same way as the Voodoo3. There is no hardware motion compensation for DVD's so playing them with a Voodoo5 can be more taxing to your processor than would a computer with a hardware decoder.

Both the VSA-100 chips do not share the 64MB of onboard memory; each chip has an allocated amount of 32mb for texture storage. The two chips share the same frame buffer so each has access to the memory needed for rendering the frames. The high fillrate is made possible by the SLI configuration of the chips and the bandwidth they have. There's more information on the Memory Subsystem in the preview so check it out if you have time but we've got to get moving along to the benchmarks!

Batter up! All tests were run twice in Quake 3 with the highest score being recorded. All eye candy was turned on and vsync was off. The only program running while benchmarking was Explorer. I've decided to pit it against a GeForce DDR because they are at similar price points ~$250 and also because we do not have any GeForce 2 cards yet. The power gamers will opt for the Voodoo5 6000 when it comes out and that's the card we will use to test against the GeForce 2.

The GeForce pulls into an early lead in the fastest setting, I guess that's why they say it performs better on low-end systems. But its lead is steadily decreased and at 1280x1024, the Voodoo5 by a good margin overtakes it. It's safe to say that the 64MB of memory on board is an advantage in high resolution gameplay. 1280x1024 seems to be the ideal resolution to play in because of the performance point of the Voodoo5. It's good to finally see a Voodoo card go over 100fps in Quake III.

Again, we see the GeForce getting to an early lead but this time it's taken by the Voodoo5 at 1024x768. Also, notice the large performance difference at 1280x1024.

Best quality is when the best cards shine and this time it's the Voodoo5 that shines, it beats the competing card by almost 9fps in 1024x768 and showing a similar difference in 1280x1024. It also performs admirably at 26.5 in the highest resolution. Again, we see the power of the VSA-100 chips and the 64MB of RAM.

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.

What good is a review if everything is positive? Well, as much as I like to go on and on about how great the card is, there are some downs that I should mention. DVD playback is a big thing nowadays with ATi, Matrox, S3, and Nvidia all offering some type of motion compensation built into their boards. The Voodoo5 does not have any motion compensation or hardware assisted playback. In fact, the DVD decoding on the Voodoo5 is exactly like it is on the Voodoo3, not apparent. This is unfortunate because as people start to watch movies on their PC, they would want a card that would help make the movies look better. Even if you have the fastest PC on earth, you will want motion compensation because of the smoothness and fluidity it gives the DVD movie.

Although this wont be a big problem for most of you, the Voodoo5 5500 draws power directly from the computer's power supply and that might be a problem for those with small power supplies. My old Sony microtower had a 90W power supply, put this card in and the power supply might not have enough power to give it the 24W it needs. Also, its massive size might obstruct cables and cords inside the case like it did mine. To get around this, all that needs to be done is rubber band the cables together and slip it under or over the card. Also, the size of the card might obstruct air passage through the case in some conditions.

When I ran 3D Mark, the program would unexpectedly crash out to the desktop. This is a rare occurrence but nevertheless something that should be looked into. If there were one thing to blame for this, it would probably be the early drivers or a specific benchmark that 3D Mark was trying to do. I could not finish my 3D Mark 2000 benchmarks because of the constant crashing. Of course the source of the problem could also be my system. However, when playing games, they would almost always remain stable. Even though it had a problem in 3D Mark, the drivers were amazingly stable for first releases. The programmers should be commended.

I have no idea what the game bundle will be like because it still hasn't been determined so please don't email me asking me if I know =). Same thing with documentation, the unit I received had no printed documentation, only a PDF file on the CD. I strongly believe that 3dfx will include a printed manual in the shipping box on release.

Pros Great performance Good price Good features FSAA amazing Lifetime warranty

Cons Bad DVD playback Strange crashing to desktop

As we bring this review to an end, we look back at the card and are still impressed at what 3dfx has made. The company that stressed framerate over quality has taken a 90-degree turn and went for framerate and quality. That quality just blew me away. I have to mention one more time that FSAA is one of the main reasons you should buy this card. Imagine Star Trek Armada without the jaggies and rough edges; imagine Need For Speed where you can actually make out the scenery, and Everquest how it's meant to look like. When you're upgrading to a Voodoo5, you're upgrading all your games along with it. FSAA makes games look like what their programmers wanted them to look like.

I'm not going to lie to you, the Voodoo5 has some problems but none that will keep you from enjoying your gaming experience, it has everything to offer. True, the low resolution framerates were a little disappointing but the high resolution beatings it gave made up for it. Also, the final implementation of 32-bit rendering, 2048x2048 textures, etc. is great.

The card is impressive, no doubt about it and the price is equally nice. Although it is set to retail at $299, some stores are pre-ordering it for $249. This a "relatively" cheap card compared to the $350 GeForce2 while delivering almost as good a performance. Combine that with solid drivers and support and you got yourself a great card. Through all the tests, I was nervous about how it would perform because I had such high expectations of the card. But my apprehension was misplaced because this card has surpassed all my expectations and has become the best-rounded card in my eyes. I can't wait until some newer drivers come out alongside some games that support T-Buffer effects. This is an exciting time for us gamers and it's destined to only get better.

Overall Rating: 9/10 SystemLogistics