3dfx Voodoo4 4500 & Voodoo5 5500 Preview

Benchmarking the card

We split up the benchmarks into three specific sections.  The first section is the performance of the Voodoo4 4500 AGP and the Voodoo5 5500 AGP in comparison to the rest of the cards out there, the second section is a comparison of performance including FSAA benchmarks of both the Voodoo4/5 and the GeForce using its software FSAA, and the final performance section is a visual performance comparison consisting of screenshots comparing the various incarnations of FSAA and their impacts on the gaming experience.

Our original intent was to show off the performance of the Voodoo4/5 in as many games as possible, but it quickly became apparent that to do so would not be the best approach.  Many readers suggested we use flight simulators in addition to our usual set of first person shooter benchmarks, but from our experiences with flight simulators, the limiting factor there is CPU power and not the fill rate of a video card. 

It is for this reason that a TNT2 and a Voodoo3 would be just as desirable as a GeForce to a gamer that only plays flight simulators; you are better off getting a TNT2 or a Voodoo3 and a faster CPU than shelling out the big bucks for a GeForce. 

Racing games such as Need for Speed 5: Porsche Unleashed are also not very demanding when it comes to having a video card with high fill rates.  Compared to something like Quake III Arena, NFS5 is a very simple game that requires only a powerful CPU and a decent graphics card.  Once again, it makes more sense to go after something that performs along the lines of a TNT2 or a Voodoo3 and get a faster CPU than to get something that performs like a GeForce.  You’ll only end up buying yourself a few more fps at the cost of around $200 - $300. 

Both of the aforementioned cases are areas where the Voodoo4/5 would excel, not because of its extremely high fill rate, because those games don’t require extremely high fill rates, but because they don’t depend on having hardware with extremely high fill rates, they will perform quite well when 4-sample FSAA is turned on, which would reduce the Voodoo5 5500’s performance to about that of a Voodoo3 3000 (in a 16-bit color single textured situation though), which is just fine for both types of those games.

Performance really becomes an issue with first person shooters such as Quake III Arena where a mid-range CPU is capable of driving the graphics card, but the performance of the setup hits the fill rate limitation of the graphics card before the CPU can really become a limiting factor.

Quake III Arena is still the best gaming benchmark because it scales properly with CPU speed as well as the resolution it is run at.  It also implements most of the features that upcoming games (first person shooters) will be using and thus provides an excellent metric for card performance under Quake III Arena, as well as the performance of the card in general. 

Unfortunately, there is no Direct3D equivalent of Quake III Arena in terms of a good benchmark, as UnrealTournament, while it is a great game, is a horrible benchmark.  Results in UnrealTournament vary greatly and the game does not scale very well with CPU speed or with resolution.  We included benchmarks using our own UnrealTournament benchmark, but the results aren’t nearly as reliable as those from Quake III Arena. 

In general, the performance of UnrealTournament on a system is just fine with a TNT2/Voodoo3 at resolutions of 1024 x 768 x 16 and below; once you get above that mark, you begin to hit the fill rate limitations of the TNT2/Voodoo3. 

In the end, the benchmarks you should pay the most attention to are the Quake III Arena benchmarks, because those say the most about the performance of the card.  If you’re a big UT fan, you should be fine with something that’s around TNT2 speed as long as you’re going to keep the resolution below 1024 x 768.  If you go above that, you’ll need something that has a higher fill rate than a TNT2 (i.e. GeForce or Voodoo4/5).  If you’re going to draw any conclusions from the UnrealTournament benchmarks, be sure to pay the most attention to the scores above 800 x 600 because the game is limited by more than one factor at lower resolutions.