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Performance
Well, you heard a decent amount of technical mumbling from me, but how fast is
this bugger actually ? We tested the Voodoo5 5500 with the latest available
Voodoo5 drivers and will compare it with a reference design GeForce2 GTS, a
videocard in the exact same price segment. The benchmarks are made with VSYNC
off.
Test System
Gigabyte Intel i820 Mainboard
Intel Pentium III 500E
128 MB CAS2 SDRAM (Corsair
memory)
Creative SB Live! Platinum
3COM 905C Ethernet Card
Windows 98 Second Edition
DirectX 7.0a
Voodoo5 5500 - Reference Driver 1.00.1
NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS - Driver: Detonator 5.22
Quake III Arena
Q3A is of course an excellent game to use as benchmark It's an up-to-date game
and has all new features available to test the card to it's maximum.
For the test we used the Quaver time demo, as this time demo will bring the
videocard down to it's knees, lot's of action, lot's
of polygons. We tested Q3A in High Quality mode, 32 Bit colors in resolutions
from 640x480 way up to 1600x1200. Also we tested the performance drop with Full Scene Anti Aliasing
turned on.
| Quake
III Arena - Quaver 32 Bit |
640x480 |
800x600 |
1024x768 |
1280x1024 |
1600x1200 |
| 3D Prophet II GTS |
59.2 |
58.5 |
52.9 |
37.8 |
26.8 |
| Voodoo5 5500 |
55.9 |
54.9 |
51.7 |
36.9 |
23 |
| GeForce 256 |
57.9 |
53.1 |
37.3 |
23.2 |
15.4 |
The results above are made without the usage of FSAA on all
videocards. The test clearly demonstrates that the GeForce2 tops the Voodoo5 without any
hassle, what is also interesting to see it that a simple GeForce 256 can keep
track of the Voodoo5 5500 up-to a resolution of 10x7, after which is starting to
loose it's ground. The Voodoo5 5500 performs quite well in an OpenGL environment. Still it
can't beat the GeForce2 GTS which is in the same price range.
| Quake
III Arena - Quaver 32 Bit |
640x480 |
800x600 |
1024x768 |
1280x1024 |
| Voodoo5 5500 |
55.9 |
54.9 |
51.7 |
36.9 |
| FSAA 2X |
55.2 |
45.3 |
30.9 |
16.6 |
| FSAA 4X |
38.6 |
23.5 |
11.7 |
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The results above are taken with
the same Q3A Quaver timedemo however, this time with
Full Scene Anti Aliasing enabled. We tested both FSAA 2X and 4X modes. What can I say,
FSAA is a nice option, but why integrate it when it virtually has no use ? I
personally do not play games below a resolution of 10x7. If you look at the
results then you'll notice that 10x7 with FSAA 2X is just about playable but
that's it. When playing a game at 4X FSAA in 10x7 the performance drops to an
incredible 11.7 Frames per second. I mean, what are we talking about here.
I know that FSAA has it's pro's and it's con's,
I also know that
a lot of you think that FSAA is a great feature. Me personally, I'll skip the
somewhat blurry images and rather play in a clear 12x10 environment. One thing is true
though, FSAA on a Voodoo5 is better than on a GeForce from a visual point of
view. If you want to buy a card
purely for FSAA then go for the Voodoo5, it has the best FSAA image quality.
Coming up: 3D Mark 2000
performance
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