3dfx Voodoo5 5500 preview @ AnandTech

Ook Anand heeft een 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 demo te zien gekregen door 3dfx, waarvan zijn verslag hier te vinden is. Hieronder een stukkie over de performance die je kunt verwachten met FSAA enabled:

According to 3dfx, depending on the final clock speed of the VSA-100 chip itself, the Voodoo5 5500 AGP will feature a fill rate of anywhere between 667 – 733 Megapixels/s. For the sake of comparison, a Voodoo3 3500 (the fastest Voodoo3 available) has a fill rate of 183 Megapixels/s and a GeForce 256 SDR/DDR has a 480 Megapixels/s fill rate. So right out of the box, the Voodoo5 5500 should be faster than any currently available card, but that’s without FSAA enabled.

Enabling 2 sample FSAA forces the VSA-100 to render each frame twice thus taking two samples, effectively cutting the fill rate in half. So the 667 – 733 MP/s range has now been reduced to 333 – 366 MP/s. Even at 2 sample FSAA, there are still some “jaggies,” which are noticeable but there is a definite improvement over having no FSAA at all.

Can you guess what happens when you enable 4 sample FSAA?

Enabling 4 sample FSAA forces the VSA-100 to render each frame four times, thus taking four samples, which effectively reduces the fill rate to 25%. That impressive 667 – 733 MP/s range is now at 166 – 183 MP/s, about the speed of a Voodoo3 3000 – 3500.

For you Voodoo3 owners, you should be able to run at your current performance level but with 4 sample FSAA enabled. Or if you want more performance, you could always shift down to 2 sample FSAA and get a nice performance boost over the Voodoo3 3500 while improving on the image quality, although not getting rid of all of the “jaggies.”