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We really wanted to
put the V5 through its paces and we set it up nine
ways from Sunday. Here are tests with
various settings in Unreal Tournament.
3dfx's
native Glide is driving the above test. Not
too shabby but unfortunately, UT only had a
16 bit color setting for Glide since historically
Voodoo didn't support 32 bit. So we moved on
to Direct 3D.
These
scores were down right impressive. Here
800X600X32 hits 30 FPS and 2X FSAA smokes at 61
FPS. Also, you almost get 2X FSAA for free, versus
no FSAA at the same resolution.
Now
let's look at how things scale across other
platforms. Our budget system was an Athlon
750 since the CPUs are so darn cheap these
days. Here are more Quake 3 scores.
A
notch behind the i820/P3-866 but still solid 32
bit color performance.
Now we
see the same CPU used on an Intel BX chipset board
and the numbers turn up even more. We have
noticed that Intel's AGP implementation for the
i820 chipset is slightly behind the BX and still
somewhat immature. However, also remember
that the AGP bus is being overclocked to 88MHz.
with an FSB of 133MHz. Yes, the V5-5550
handled this bus overclock without incident and
turned in better scores as a result. 1024X768 with
2X FSAA looked sweet at 36.7 FPS in 32 bit color.
What
should you take away from this preview?
Well, for sure you can see that the Voodoo5 has a
lot of promise. Not yet ready for release,
this card has shown us great image quality with
FSAA and 32 bit color. Frame rates were
decent with all features turned up to max in Quake
and UT with 4X FSAA and 2X FSAA. There is a
lot of driver optimization to come before the
release of the product to the retail
channel. Remember when the GeForce first
came out? Remember the frame rate increases
that were offered with each new driver release and
even recently with the 5.13 drivers? We
think surely you can expect the same migration to
higher performance with the Voodoo5, even before
they hit the shelves, not to mention as the weeks
roll on after release.
There
will be no rating here for this product since it
is in pre-release status and it would be unfair to
pass full judgment at this point in time.
What we can tell you is that it has changed the
way we look at 3D Image Quality in computer
graphics. In addition, 3dfx has raised the
performance bar once again. The weeks and
months to come will certainly be very interesting
considering all of the new products coming to
market in the 3D Graphics arena. We think
the Voodoo5 will provide a gaming and 3D graphics
solution that will make a lot of folks much
happier in their over all experience.
Update!
5/12/00
We
now have Final Release Drivers, New Benchmarks and
a Full Rating
Go
there now!
-Davo
So,
what do you think?
Get into the HotHardware Conference Room and tell
us!
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