3dfx Driver Build 1.04.01: Increased Performance and Hidden Surface Removal (HSR) for the Voodoo4 and Voodoo5

Voodoo5 5500 - FSAA Performance

One other major attraction of the Voodoo5 5500 is its full scene anti-aliasing support (FSAA). 3dfx was the first manufacturer to not only publicly mention FSAA but also support it in a product. The idea of "smoothing" the edges of a picture in order to produce a clearer picture grabbed the attention of many, and the Voodoo5 5500's design essentially screams for FSAA support.

By including two VSA-100 chips on the Voodoo5 5500, the card's performance is equal to that of a single chip VSA-100 solution (3dfx's Voodoo4 4500) when 2x FSAA is enabled. Although this means that the resolution must be brought down to compensate for the performance loss, many claim that FSAA at lower resolutions looks better than no FSAA at higher ones. Throughout the months that have passed since FSAA's introduction, the question of which is better, higher resolutions or FSAA, still sparks heated debate. For more information on FSAA, please see our FSAA & Image Quality Comparison.

We were curious to see what kind of improvements in the FSAA arena came with updated driver builds. We have already seen rather large improvements in non-FSAA scores in Quake III Arena, but would the drivers provide similar results with FSAA on? Let's take a look.

We thought we saw large performance gains between driver builds with FSAA disabled, but those gains appear to be only the tip of the iceberg. While running Quake III Arena in a variety of resolutions with 2x FSAA enabled, we were able to realize huge performance increases throughout the whole spectrum.

At 640x480x32, updating the Voodoo5 5500's drivers produced a 11% performance gain, pushing the 2x FSAA score up to 84.2, only 11.2 FPS below that of the non-FSAA score.

The performance increase was most dramatic at 800x600x32, a resolution that many people choose to use FSAA in. Here, the Voodoo5 5500 was able to increase performance by 33%, pushing the scores over the much desired 60 FPS mark.

Finally, at 1024x768x32, an update to the 1.04.01 drivers allowed the card's performance to increase by 11%, the same performance increase we saw at 640x480x32.

Although the performance increases seen when in FSAA 2x mode are impressive, they are not that unexpected. Since enabling FSAA 2x means that the Voodoo5 5500 must render each frame twice, it makes sense that the effectiveness of the driver update is realized two fold. At 640x480x32 we see that this is almost exactly the case, with the non-FSAA performance increase clocking in a 5% and the FSAA performance increase double that at 11%. Although we did not test non-FSAA at 800x600x32 (as this is no longer a resolution included in our standard video card tests), it is quite logical to expect that the Voodoo5 5500's performance at this resolution increased by about 15% after the driver update due to the fact that 2x FSAA performance increased by 33%. Finally, at 1600x1200x32 the Voodoo5 5500 begins to become hardware limited as opposed by driver limited when FSAA 2x is enabled. This explains why the Voodoo5 5500 gains 11% with FSAA enabled at this resolution but still gains 9% speed with FSSA disabled.