3dfx Voodoo5 5500 > Reviews (15)

Is it true that the 3Dfx range for the PCI slot is coming to an end?
I really hope not. I do know that a lot of older machines are going to come to a grinding halt when upgrading without their technology.

At the moment, Voodoo cards are made in two type of of slot fitting.
One being the older PCI fitting that nearly everyone has and some people have the newer AGP slot fitting. AGP technology is meant to be vastly improved and the PCI slot fitting cards are becoming outdated. Basically because the newer, high performance cards are just wasted on older type machines.

The Voodoo 5500 is one such PCI card. While it offers you great performance, it does seem a bit strange offering it in PCI format. The users who will make the most out of it no doubt already own a high spec machine that comes with AGP slots. I doubt there will be many non AGP slot machines around that can handle or utilise the peroformance of the 5500.

So what does it offer?
Its one of the first 32 bit colour cards to be offered by 3Dfx and looks like being the last. Until now, they have continued along the 16 bit route that offered stability and excellent rendering. But with NVIDIA technology hounding them, they have finally adopted the 32 lifestyle.
This gives the user great depth in colour for gameplay, for shading and lighting in those fast action yet moody atmosphere games.
As for colour and frame buffering, the onboard storage puts it pait of 32Mb chips to good use. This is scalable up to 256Mb of frame buffer. Enough backup poke for any gamer.
Its unusual to see two coolant fans onboard a graphics card but that is the way they keep their workhorse at operating temperature.
This does make it a bit bigger than past cards and also takes up a bit more room in your tower.
The actual card is classified as a 128bit 2d/3d graphics accelerator. Whatit accelerates is my gameplaying qualities and my love for the whole Voodoo experience.
Installation is straightforward. Pop off your case lid and locate a spare PCI slot. They run parallel along the motherboard normally from front to back. Push the card into place carefully and close the lid. Restart your machine and it should auto detect.
Simply insert the CD when it asks for the drivers and it should self install.
The whole operation takes about 10 minutes.
The Processor substitiutes (rememberits not NVIDIA here) are called VSA 100s and contain 14 million transistors! They run at 350Mhz, faster than older PC's main processors! and they can support refresh rates of up to 160Hz. More than most monitors can cope with.
It will support a resolution of up to 2048x1536. That is twice as high and twice as wide as a suitable 17 inch monitor setup and all of this at up to 85Hz!
For all of you techies that love my hi tech bits, here is what it can give you:
64MB frame buffer

32-bit RGBA rendering

32-bit textures

24-bit Z & W buffers

8-bit stencil

2Kx2K textures

FXT1 Texture Compression

SLI support for Real-Time Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) and the T-Buffer Digital Cinematic Effects… all in hardware.

The SLI support does make a lot of difference to real motion video and the Anti Aliasing assists in removing the blocky and jagged appearance to lines in frames. It is called the "staircase effect". If you have ever drawn a diagonal line in a paint package and zoomed in, you will know what im talking about. Anti Aliasing significantly reduces this effect and makes lines appear more smotthly drawn.
The FXT1 is provided to revent a build up in performance wfen texturising screens. A much quicker response rate is achieve thanks to this.
The T buffer that comes on the VSA 100 chip aids blur effects on screen and gives a performance hike in real time video and graphics.
Superb to see apart from making your eyes go abit funny and feeling a bit dizzy.
I would not recommend overclocking it to get more out of this card. It seem to run at its optimum level already. Any increase results in tearing of the graphics and an unstable enviroment to work.

A truly great card and possibly the last of the decent PCI breed.
If you can track one down, expect to pay about £120-£150 for one.