3dfx V5500 AGP Review - By Mark "Frugal" Bush Page 2 of 2
Features & Performance
The flagship feature of this card is the T-Buffer effects so they seem
to be a logical place to start. Of these the only one that is worthy
of consideration in this review is Full Scene Anti Aliasing (FSAA). No
API currently supports the other T-Buffer effects at this time, although
it is hoped that DX8 will have support for them. I'm not a great believer
in placing any weight on an untested feature so we'll ignore all save
the FSAA in this review.
What is this FSAA that everyone is buzzing about? In a nutshell it's
a jaggy remover, image smoother outerer, make your graphics look luvverly
jubbly type thing :). It comes in 2 flavours 2x and 4x fsaa. 3dfx uses
something known as Rotated Grid Super-Sampling to achieve the anti aliasing.
What basically happens is that a super-sampled copy of the image is stored
in the back buffer (this can be either 2X or 4x the size of the original
frame). Some technical jiggery pokery is applied to this super-sampled
image, it is then reduced to the original size, slightly rotated and
finally combined with the original image. The end result being no more
jaggies and a far crisper image all round.
This particular method of anti-aliasing has the advantage of not only
smoothing out the jaggies but it also stops the texture shimmering evident
in sims like Falcon 4. In this review I will concentrate on 4x fsaa as
I have only found a couple of games (gp3, Rally Championship and EECH)
that require dropping down to 2x.
So is this FSAA a big deal? You bet your ass it is!! Many sims are completely
transformed by FSAA, in my opinion it's the single most impressive feature
of any video card to date. Take a look at the following screens of Longbow
2. The first 2 are at 640 x 480 and I have expanded them to 1024x768
to give a reasonable representation of how it looks on a 17" monitor.
As you can see the 4X FSAA transforms LB2 into a different game, it now
looks like a new sim and I have found myself playing it more often as
a result.
640x480 No FSAA
640x480 4xFSAA
1024x768 No FSAA
1024x768 4xFSAA
Also take a look at the following shots of EAW taken at 800 x 600 with
the CFS terrain. Again the FSAA makes a huge difference. One thing that
you can't tell from the screenshots is that without FSAA the shimmering
on the terrain is really bad, this spoilt the immersion for me. With
the FSAA the shimmering is completely gone, for me that was almost worth
the price of the card. You really have to see this in game to truly appreciate
it .................. Awesome!!
800x600 No FSAA
800x600 4xFSAA
800x600 No FSAA
800x600 4xFSAA
Ah but FSAA is only of use at low resolutions I hear you say. This is
simply not true, FSAA will enhance an image at high resolutions too,
and in fact, a lower resolution with FSAA is often preferable to a high
res aliased image in both image quality and performance. Take a look
at the following screens showing Falcon 4 and CFS 2 both taken at 1024
with and without FSAA. The difference is still very noticeable.
1024x768 No FSAA
1024x768 4xFSAA
1024x768 No FSAA
1024x768 4xFSAA
1024x768 No FSAA
1024x768 4xFSAA
1024x768 No FSAA
1024x768 4xFSAA
Ok so it looks good but I feel the need, the need for speed (sorry couldn't
resist the Top Gun quote :) So far I have had no problems with speed
in any of the games that I've played, if you look back at the *
Falcon 4 and CFS 2 screenshots you will see that even with 4x FSAA enabled
the frame rate is respectable. The Falcon 4 shots are taken over the
flot in campaign with all sliders to the right and with the current beta
of RP4, in the case of CFS 2 those shots were taken in 16bit colour at
1024 x 768 I have not actually noticed any performance hit when using
4X FSAA except in Rally Championship where I needed to drop to 2x FSAA
and GP3 where the game crashes with 4x fsaa enabled.
* Unfortunately, taking screenshots in Falcon 4 hits the frame
rate quite hard and so the fps counter in the screenshots does not accurately
reflect the frame rate in the game.
The fill rate of this card is not as high as the GeForce 2's so it's
not likely to be the fastest card on the block when it comes to fill
rate limited games such as Quake 3 (but then I got 66fps with Q3a's graphics
maxed out so it's certainly no slouch :). However, flight sims are not
generally fill rate limited but rather cpu limited. As such the 667-733
Megapixels Per Second should be plenty for our needs.
3dfx have corrected several of the limitations of the older Voodoo cards.
32bit colour is now an option that was previously unavailable to voodoo
owners. There is a performance hit when going to 32bit but it is not
as bad as one would expect. Personally I have always considered 32bit
to be another red herring, I have never considered the extra image quality
worth the performance hit and my mind hasn't changed yet. When set to
16bit colour the V5500 uses interpolated 22bit colour, as a result I
can see very little difference between 16bit on the V5500 and 32bit on
any other card. The V5500 definitely gets my thumbs up for image quality,
both in 16bit and 32 bit. I find the image quality with this card to
be absolutely awesome, I have not personally witnessed better on any
card.
The Voodoo 5500 supports large textures (2048 x 2048) and also 32bit
textures. This is welcomed as many games use both of these features CFS
2 being a notable example. These features allow far more detail to be
shown in any textured object. Look at the planes in CFS 2 and you can
see why this is an important feature. Several forms of texture compression
are supported including 3dfx's own FXT1 and directX compression. Texture
compression is good because it saves on memory usage and bandwidth. This
is quite important with the V5500 as although it has 64MB ram each VSA100
can only access 32MB. Considering the fact that FSAA is gonna use a chunk
of that memory to do it's thang 64MB is not as much memory as it sounds.
Hmm let's backtrack a few, so each VSA100 can only talk to 32MB, so does
that mean that this is really only a 32MB card? Well the simple answer
to that is no. The bottom line is it has 64MB so it's a 64MB card, that
being said because the memory is unified both chips have to duplicate
textures, this will mean that you ultimately only have 32mb of texture
memory. This is not a problem today, but could mean a performance hit
in the future is a game has particularly heavy texture usage and is possibly
why the V5500 doesn't have enough memory to run EECH with 4x FSAA.
The 2D performance of this card is outstanding, I did not think that
I would see another card match my old G200 for 2D but the V5500 may have
just edged past. The image quality is superb and resolutions up to 2048x1536
at 85Hz are supported which is far more than I can say for my monitor.
As far as the speed in 2D is concerned we are at the stage where this
isn't even an issue anymore as most (if not all) modern 2D cards are
much faster than we need.
Conclusions
Now let's have a look back at my 3 criteria for buying a card and see
how the V5500 holds up. Is it fast enough? Well I would definitely have
to answer yes to that one, I have had no problems with the speed of this
card and it is certainly able to run my games at an acceptable speed.
Thanks to the FSAA my games look incredible even several old ones have
a new lease of life so criteria number 2 is most definitely in the bag.
So am I happy I got this card? Happy! I'm over the f***ing moon about
it. I just wish I could afford one for my other machine, hmm just need
to work out the "I need a V5500 because" speech for the wife :)
Is this the fastest card money can buy? Probably not, hard to say without
testing them all (donations accepted gladly:-) Would I recommend it as
the best video card on the market? The simple answer to that is best
for what purposes? I certainly believe that it is the best card for my
needs and anyone with similar needs should be very happy with the card.
If image quality at a good speed is where your priorities lie, then this
is probably the card for you. Certainly if you primarily use your PC
for Flight Sims, Racing games and older 3D titles then you won't go far
wrong with this card.
Mark "Frugal" Bush
Test System specs
Celeron II 566 @ 850mhz
Abit VH6 Motherboard
192MB PC133 Ram
SBLive Sound Card
Maxtor 10.5 GB UDMA HD
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