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

The Voodoo4 4500

Just like the Voodoo5 5500, the Voodoo4 4500 was extremely delayed. The idea behind the budget Voodoo4 4500 was quite a good one: instead of having two VSA-100 chips each with 32MB of memory each like the Voodoo5 5500 has, 3dfx decided to produce a lower cost card that only utilized one VSA-100 chip paired with 32MB of memory total. As was the case with the Voodoo5 5500, if the Voodoo4 4500 came when it was expected it would have been not only a novel idea but also a rather impressive product. The problem is that the Voodoo4 4500 did not launch until October of this year. For more information on the Voodoo4 4500, please see our Voodoo4 4500 review.

The delay pushed the Voodoo4 4500 into competition with two other high performance budget cards, the NVIDIA GeForce2 MX and the ATI Radeon SDR. As we saw in our Budget Video Card Comparison - November 2000, the Voodoo4 4500 could not compete with the other higher performing options. Let's see if updated drivers can put the Voodoo4 4500 in a more favorable position.

Voodoo4 4500 - Quake III Arena Performance

Unlike the dramatic performance increase we saw with a simple driver update in the case of the Voodoo5 5500, updating the Voodoo4 4500's drivers result in no performance change. The scores remain the same regardless of which driver built is used. This is most likely due to the fact that the Voodoo4 4500 was already using driver build 1.03.00 upon its release. This means that while the original Voodoo5 5500 drivers lagged behind the most recent drivers by about 3 publicly released builds, the Voodoo4 4500 drivers only changed by one build since the card's release.

At 1024x768x32 we come to the same conclusion: the 1.03.00 drivers that shipped with the Voodoo4 4500 have not been that modified when compared to the latest driver build.

The results at 1600x1200x32 match the results found above.