Benchmarks: Voodoo5 5500 AGP

I´ve received brandnew drivers from 3dfx (12.05.2000) for my Voodoo5 5500 review. The card performs very well with these drivers. I made a quick preview to show you the scores of the V5 5500 with these new babies compared to GeForce2 GTS (reference card, v5.16), GeForce DDR (V6800, v5.16) and TNT2 Ultra (V3800, v5.16). I´ve tested on with a Pentium III 800E in Windows98SE with 192MB RAM. Mainboard: Tekram P6BX-A.

Images of the new 3dfx card:
Overview	Dual VSA-100	Powersupply	6ns SDRAM

Quake3. The OpenGL game that is the state of the art benchmarks because of his modern 3D engine. I uses the following settings vor my benchmarks:

Version: v1.16n

Normal: 16Bit Rendering with bilinearer filtering.
High Quality: 32Bit Rendering with trilineare filtering
High Quality ++: 32Bit Rendering with trilineare filtering, + max. texture resolution and polygons

Quake3 NORMAL - P3 800E

In 800x600 both GeForce cards are in top (where is a T&L limitation here Mr. Wicher...?) . But in 1024x768 is following the GeForce DDR very close and is going above it at higher resolutions. The GeForce2 pulls away in all resoltions.

Quake3 High Quality - P3 800E

In 800x600 both GeForce cards are on top again. But at 1024x768 the GeForce DDR is outperformed by the V5. At higher resolutions GeForce2 is still on top but V5 is follwing pretty close!

Quake3 High Quality ++ - P3 800E

The same as before. The polygon count is not an argument here because actual cards can handle some few more polygons very easy. The Q3 engine does only use more polygons on curved surfaces with this setting and those are used only on special places in a Q3 level.

DRAKAN - P3 800E

The Direct 3D game Drakan shows the same situation as Quake3. But in 800x600 the V5 is a bit above GeForce2 for the first time (The Prohet II GTS scored 65 here...). At higher resolutions GeForce2 is in front, followed by the V5. GeForce DDR is behind V5 in all resolutions.

I´ll post the whole review soon. There I´ll also focus on things like AntiAliasing etc. Also interesting how it performs against GeForce(2) in high polygon games.

First impression of the V5

If... it´s kind of tragic for 3dfx that they were not able to bring the cards in time at end of 99. The V5 would have been a pain in the neck for NVIDIA as you can see the card above GeForce DDR in some benchmarks. GeForce2 is pulling away in almost all situations but it is limited by the memory bandwith. 3dfx should finaly bring the cards in the shelves now because NVIDIA will shoot back with faster memory for GeForce2 soon! V5 6000? First 3dfx has to deliver 5500 and the models below. 200MHz DDR memory is expensive but not as 128MB SDRAM (4x32MB) which are needed for V5 6000.

3dfx

Copyright: 14.05.2000 -   RIVA Station 2000 - Lars Weinand
No Copy without Permission!

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