3dfx V5500 AGP Review - By Mark "Frugal" Bush Page 1 of 2
Several
years ago a little company called 3dfx revolutionised pc graphics with
their Voodoo card. For the first time pc owners could have arcade quality
graphics in their home. 3dfx became so synonymous with 3D acceleration
that it was not uncommon for some people to refer to ALL 3D cards as
a 3dfx card regardless of whether it was a voodoo card or one of the
alternative 3D accelerators around in those early days.
These days the competition has been a little hotter and other companies
have been competing with 3dfx on at least an equal level, in some ways
the competition has been beating 3dfx with features such as 32 bit colour
t&l etc. The V5500 has a lot to prove to today's gamer, especially as
3dfx opted to leave out hardware t&l at this stage in favour of the T-buffer
effects (more on these later). Their strategy is based on producing a
card that would not only be able to run today's games but would also
enhance yesterday's game too. As I still play a lot of yesterdays games
ie Longbow 2, Falcon 4 (it's pushing 2 years old now), Mig Alley etc,
I can certainly appreciate the value of this approach if it delivers.
So let's look at the feature set of the V5500 as advertised by 3dfx
l 64 MB of Graphics Memory
l 667-733 Megapixels Per Second Fill Rate
l Real-time Full-Scene HW Anti-Aliasing
l T-Buffer™ Digital Cinematic Effect: Motion
blur
l T-Buffer Digital Cinematic Effect: Depth
of Field Blur
l T-Buffer Digital Cinematic Effect: Soft
Shadows
l T-Buffer Digital Cinematic Effect: Soft
Reflections
l FXT1™ and DirectX® Texture Compression
l 8-bit Palletized Textures
l 32-bit Rendering
l 32-bit Textures
l 2k x 2k Textures
l 24-bit Floating Point Depth Buffer (Z
or W)
l 8-bit Stencil Buffer
l Fully integrated 128-bit 2D/3D/Video
Accelerator
l 350MHz RAMDAC
l DirectX, OpenGL, and Glide support
l DVD hardware assist: planar to packed-pixel
conversion
Hardware
On the face of it not a bad feature set, let's look at the hardware behind
those features. The card itself is a whopping 9.6" Long x 4.2" wide (24.4
cm x 10.7 cm). This could be a problem for some cases so it would be
worthwhile checking to see if the card will fit in your case before you
purchase one of these cards. The card is well constructed and has a heatsink
and fan on each of VSA-100 chips of which the 5500 has 2 working in SLI.
The card and the fans need a lot of power and so the V5500 needs to be
connected to the psu in much the same way as your cdrom drive. 3dfx have
included a Y power connector for this purpose so there's no need to worry
if you don't have a spare power connector. It would definitely be prudent
to make sure that your power supply can spare the extra juice required
by the V5500 though, I would recommend at least a 300W PSU.
Installation.
The documentation supplied with the V5500 is adequate, it's nothing to
write home about but then show me a vid card manual that is. As per the
included instructions I reverted back to the standard VGA drivers before
shutting down my machine and swapping out the old card in favour of the
new. Due to my large Full tower case the V5500 slotted in without a problem
although this could be a bit tricky in a smaller case. Once the machine
was powered up Windows immediately detected the card and asked for the
location of the drivers. I pointed Windows to where I had placed the
latest V5500 drivers that I had downloaded from 3dfxgamers.com prior
to ripping out my old card (forward planning pays :), some chugging later
Windows rebooted.
Once Windows was back up my desktop was back in glorious 16bit, this
was where I first started to like this card. The 2D looked far more vivid
than it had on my old card. I also had a nice new 3dfxtools icon in my
taskbar. Upon closer inspection this icon gives access to all of the
video modes display properties options for the card. The options here
are quite extensive and allow you to tweak the card to within an inch
of it's life. These are separated between Glide and D3D so you can configure
each separately to get the best performance possible. So far I have found
the latest drivers to be relatively problem free, GP3 crashes using 4xFSAA
but it works fine with 2X FSAA and I've had no other problems.
One thing worth mentioning is that whilst my own installation went without
a hitch, many people have reported problems when upgrading from a Voodoo
3. This is caused primarily by a conflict between the V3 and V5500 drivers.
Providing you completely uninstall the Voodoo 3 drivers before installing
your V5500 you should have no problem. If you are not sure how to do
this you can go HERE
for detailed instructions.
Ok now down to the meat of the review, how well does the card perform
in games and do I need those features? If you are expecting lots of 3dmarks
in this review then you have come to the wrong place, I played with 3dmark2000
for some time and concluded that it was a pretty boring game. Benchmarks
only serve a useful purpose when you are comparing cards. To be quite
honest I've never been a real fan of benchmarks they are a red herring.
Don't expect too much tech talk either, I'm sure you don't want to know
about per pixel LOD (level of detail) MIP mapping with biasing and clamping
etc, as long as it get's the job done.
I have only 3 criterion by which I judge a video card.
1. Does it run my games at an acceptable speed
2. Do my games look really good with this card
3. Am I happy that I got this card.
Rather than look at these 3 now I will talk a little about the key features
and how they affect the games I play, then we'll see how the card stands
up.
