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Voodoo 5 - 5500
...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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