| This
product review needs no introduction. We
have been waiting a long time for the next coming
of Voodoo Graphics. In what seems like a
deluge of market hype over next generation 3D
Graphics chipsets from various vendors, 3dfx
unleashes one of their most lethal weapons in the
battle for 3D dominance. Currently in an
"Alpha 2" stage, we received, what 3dfx
would classify as their mid range product, the
Voodoo5-5500 AGP.
We at HotHardware
want to emphasize again that the board we will
show you in the following pages, is indeed built
on "Alpha 2" Silicon with very early
Beta Drivers backing it up. There is
still a lot of optimization that will take place
in the next few weeks before the official Retail
and OEM release. However, we intend to give
you full detail with respect to every aspect of
its performance and feature set, at this point in
time. If you want to know EVERYTHING there
is to know about the Voodoo5 to date, you came to
the right place. Let's rock...
 |
| Voodoo5
5500 AGP Specifications / Features |
| Voodoo
On Steroids |
|
Click
all images for full view
-
64 MB of Graphics Memory
- 667-733 Megapixels Per Second Fill Rate
- Real-time Full-Scene HW Anti-Aliasing
- T-Buffer Digital Cinematic Effect: Motion blur
- T-Buffer
Digital Cinematic Effect: Depth of Field Blur
- T-Buffer Digital Cinematic Effect: Soft Shadows
- T-Buffer Digital Cinematic Effect: Soft
Reflections
- FXT1 and DirectX® Texture Compression 8-bit
Palletized Textures
- 32-bit Rendering
- 32-bit Textures
- 2k x 2k Textures
- 24-bit Floating Point Depth Buffer (Z or W)
- 8-bit Stencil Buffer
- Fully integrated 128-bit 2D/3D/Video Accelerator
- 350MHz RAMDAC
- The industry's most complete API support: DirectX,
OpenGL, and Glide
- DVD hardware assist: planar to packed-pixel
conversion
We won't
re-hash the specifics on each of the Cinematic Effects
but if you would like a refresher, please look at our 3dfx
Tech Summit Article or V5
Incarnate articles. We go into fair detail
in those two pieces. For this preview we will go
into depth on the hardware, software drivers, relative
performance and FSAA (Full Scene Anti-Ailiasing).
The board
we received was as clean as a whistle. The lay
out is neat and organized. The card is however,
rather large. This is a picture of the V5-5500
installed on our Abit
KA7 Athlon Motherboard and housed in a removable
ATX Motherboard Tray. As you can see, it sticks
out beyond the even this larger type ATX
Motherboard. However, it still is within the ATX
case dimension spec. Also, as you can see in
this shot, the Power Connector is mounted on the top
of the board for easy access to a spare mate inside
your case. This will provide abundant and clean
regulated power to the Voodoo5, a feature we have come
to appreciate. You will not have to worry about
whether or not your motherboard can supply enough
juice via the AGP slot.
This was
to be expected, with two VSA-100 chips on board and
64MB of SDRAM, there are a lot of pins and traces to
route. There are only 4 SDRAM chips on the
Voodoo5 which is surprising for a 64MB board.
Here is a shot of the RAM that came with our
unit. They are 64MB devices in a X32
organization, 8K refresh and rated at 166MHz.
Will you
look at that! There is also an IDT (the daytime
gig for yours truly) QuickSwitch in this shot.
The QS3861 is a 10 bit Bus Switch that is great for
muxing DRAMs. Regardless, we'll make sure we
maintain our objectivity even in light of 3dfx's
excellent vendor selection. Being from the
Massachusetts area, I don't have the luxury of 3dfx as
a customer, so not to worry. :)
The photo
shoot was long and torturous for us, getting all these
pictures together. We were itching to just plug
it in and let it rip! So, enough with the beauty
pageant. Let's get some Voodoo, shall we?
|
