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...continued
The
3dfx driver tool allows you to choose the extent of
the antialiasing you wish the card to perform. The
VSA-100 chips take samples of nearby pixels and
rotate them to find color averages, and it uses
this data to blend away jagged edges and lines. It
can use either two or four samples, the latter
offering better visual quality with a larger
performance hit than the former. The best part:
this feature works with any D3D, OpenGL, or
Glide-accelerated game, old and new.
We
tested this feature with at least a dozen games,
including Falcon 4.0, Jane's F/A-18, MiG Alley,
SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle, Thief II: The Metal
Age, Tachyon: The Fringe, Need for Speed: Porsche
Unleashed, and more. In every case, the game was
smoothly playable at 800-by-600-pixel resolution
with two-sample FSAA turned on, and most ran nicely
with four-sample FSAA at the same resolution.
Two-sample FSAA, predictably, left a few jaggies
and shimmers, but four-sample FSAA looked as good
as if we'd cranked up the res to 1,280 by 1,024 or
better.
The
only game that gave us trouble was Unreal
Tournament. Turning on FSAA at any res, any color
depth at either sample caused a game-killing delay
in control response. Even after we turned FSAA off,
we had to reboot the machine to exorcise this
bizarre demon.
This
is the hardest part of the review, because it's
extremely subjective. To put it bluntly, high-res,
nonantialiased scenes look better than low-res
screens with FSAA. Not much better, but better
nonetheless.
Seeing
a game in motion is different from looking at
screen shots. We detect a hint of blurriness with
FSAA on that we do not see if we turn FSAA off and
run the same game at, say, 1,600 by 1,200
resolution. FSAA is an overrated feature; we'd
rather see cards that can run games very fast at
incredibly high res than cards that do a decent job
of FSAA at low res.
Conclusion
Just
because we don't believe in the benefits of FSAA
doesn't mean you won't. If you're running games in
low res for any reason--be it a small monitor or an
older, weaker processor--you'll love the Voodoo5
5500's FSAA capabilities.
The
Voodoo5 5500 has its place in the market. It's not
a GeForce killer, but the FSAA will certainly make
it worthwhile for some gamers to buy. Of course, if
you're still hooked on Glide-only games of
yesteryear, this is the only card in town (unless
you hold off for the more powerful, much more
expensive Voodoo5 6000).
On
the other hand, as we did with the Voodoo3, we
doubt this card's staying power. There have yet to
be games announced that would use the T-buffer. The
lack of a T&L engine could hurt, too; some
games already use other 3D cards' transform
functions, and the list is growing. We can
recommend the Voodoo5 5500 AGP to certain gamers,
but most of our audience, we feel, should look
elsewhere.
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