HotHardware - Voodoo 5 In House PREview

The 3dfx Voodoo 5 5500 AGP
An "In House" PREview and Test Of Alpha 2 Product

Image Quality

A new meaning to the term "eye candy"...

Most likely the single most important aspect that 3dfx is pitching about the Voodoo5, is image quality and a new level of immersion. Although we can't show you any in-game shots of the various Cinematic Effects, like Motion Blur or Soft Shadows, YET. We can generate our own screen shots (versus those provided by 3dfx in the past) with Full Scene Anti-Aliasing. This is a feature that will be available in any game you play. All you have to do is enable some level of FSAA in the control panel. We'll also try and compare image quality here to NVidia's competitive approach to FSAA, although they do not officially support it yet. The NVidia 5.13 reference drivers that were leaked will be used later in this section, for side by side comparisons.

First lets look at a game where FSAA can have the most significant impact. Here are shots from Electonic Arts' Need For Speed - Porche Unleashed with 4X FSAA, 2X FSAA and no FSAA. All shots were taken with the V5-5500.

You must click all images for full view and effect

NS5 No FSAA	NS5 2X FSAA
NS5 4X FSAA

Take a look at the shot without FSAA. Look at the spoiler on the red car and the entire image of the white car. What you can't see here is the way the textures were swimming all over the place on the spoiler of the red car. Believe it or not, you eyes get use to looking at these totally unnatural artifacts. Now, take a look at the 2X FSAA shot. Not too shabby at all, is it? The white car is cleaned up pretty well and the spoiler on the red car looks much better. Then finally look at the 4X FSAA shot. It looks perfect, just the way the artist rendered it. We have said this before and I'll say it here again. Once you are exposed to good quality FSAA, you won't ever want to go back again. NS5 is one beautiful game to look at. It is a shame to screw it up with jaggies and pixel popping. You don't have to anymore... Since this game is SO darn good looking, here are the original TGA screen shots for your download pleasure. (large file for the bandwidth advantaged)

Now lets look at another game that takes advantage of FSAA in a big way. Flight Simulators have always had a tough time with rough edges, swimming textures and landscapes. Here are shots of Electronic Arts' USAF. This time we'll compare 4X, 2X and No FSAA, as well as NVidia's FSAA generated on a GeForce DDR card. What 3dfx is claiming, is that their "jittered sub-sample" approach in 2X mode, is as good if not better than the competitions. Their 4X FSAA on the Voodoo5, is touted as being in a league by itself. Let's take a look.

Click images to see the difference
Images are 1024X768 and large file sizes with 100% JPEG quality setting

No FSAA taken on V5	2X FSAA taken on Voodoo5
FSAA taken with GeForce & 5.13 Drivers	4X FSAA taken on Voodoo5

Allow me to be very clear on this issue. Make up your own mind with respect to which image you prefer. After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say (we won't get into that "Chayote date" you had back in your school days... :) ). We took the NVidia FSAA shot with the FSAA enabled in D3D and the slider set all the way up to max. Here is a shot of the setting for verification.

Frankly, I am not confident that FSAA is truly enabled with this setting in the NVidia 5.13 driver. Maybe it is but it sure doesn't look like it to me from the screenshot above. Again, you make the call here.

Update 4/26/00

As it turns out, indeed FSAA is not functional in most Direct 3D games with the GeForce. To make a judgment on the FSAA quality of the GeForce based on the picture above, would be unfair. Please refer down to the bottom of this page for a screen shot taken in Quake3 Arena via OpenGL. This should give you a side by side comparison of the two, although clearly not a dramatic as what you would see in a Flight Simulator.

What I can say is that USAF looks damn good with 4X FSAA at 1024X768 as well as 2X FSAA and it is VERY playable. While, we didn't have the ability to take a frame rate from the game, we would estimate it to be at least 35+ FPS when running with 4X FSAA. This is a guess but all we can say is it was smooth. Did the frame rate drop? You bet it did but we far preferred the hit in frame rate with the significantly improved image quality to 60+ FPS with jaggies and swimming textures all over the place. I think flight sims in general really showcase FSAA.

How about a little Baseball? :) Once again click for the full monty....

V5 and MS Baseball No FSAA	V5 and MS Baseball 2X FSAA
V5 and MS Baseball 4X FSAA

A significant difference for sure. Again, here 2X FSAA does a real nice job of cleaning things up but 4X FSAA is to die for.

Finally, we'll end this long page with Quake 3 shots, since you are all probably wondering where these are.

No FSAA @ 1024X768	4X FSAA @ 800X600
NVidia FSAA

Here you'll see Quake 3 at 1024X768 with no FSAA and also Q3 at 800X600 with 4X FSAA. We set these up this way to prove a point. One of our readers sent in an email saying that FSAA didn't make that much of a difference and you could just crank the resolution up and achieve almost the same effect. Take a look at both of these shots. Look at the stairs and the rocket launcher on the biker chick. My personal favorite resolution has always been 1024X768 on our 19" monitor. Now, I would take the 800X600 image quality with 4X FSAA, HANDS DOWN over the 1024X768 shot without FSAA. Again, you can decide which you like best. I think the choice is obvious. Give me good FSAA, every time. In addition, you'll see what NVidia's FSAA looks like. Not too bad at all. There are still slight jagged edges on the stairs behind Patriot and across the water but it looks pretty good.

So, let's crank out some benchmarks, shall we? ;-)

Voodoo5-5500 Benchmarks !!