We won't go into a
full blown discussion in this section since after
all, these are beta drivers and software that we
were working with and they could very well change
significantly before the release date.
However, we can tell you that the installation was
uneventful (just the way we like it) and the card
was up and running in a matter of minutes.
Here are a couple of screen shots of the driver
control panels.
Click
all images for full view
To say
the Voodoo5 Driver Suite is full featured would be
an understatement. I especially like the
ability to adjust Gamma settings for Desktop, D3D,
Glide/OpenGL and Video Overlay, totally
independent of each other. Also, as you will
note in the top right pic, Texture Compression can
be toggled on or off. For the tests in this
review, the drivers sent to us were set to be
always on. This made no difference as far as
our eyes could perceive with respect to game image
quality. More on this later.
Yes,
boys and girls, you can overclock the Voodoo5
5500. As you can see, indeed the core clock
is set to 166 and it is synchronous with the
memory clock. We were able to overclock our
board somewhat but we'll cover that later.
Click
all images for full view
Although
our pre-release card did not come with a DVD
player, we are sure there will be software
included to play your favorite titles, when you
want to relax after a hard battle in the
arena. So we tried our luck with Power DVD
just to see how the Voodoo5 did in our reference
system, a P3-866 w/ 128MB of RAM, with respect to
the silver screen.
Hey
man, look! Not only does Neo know Kung Fu but that
punk's got Voodoo! |
