Introduction

Woohoo, update!

Yesterday, we talked with 3dfx to get the lowdown on what's so special about the new 1.03 Voodoo5 drivers. They told us which processors should show the most improvement, and expanded on the new Geometry Assist feature.

In terms of OpenGL performance they improved on Pentium 2 support the most. We don't have a Pentium 2 here to test, but 3dfx estimated that the performance increase on the Pentium 2 should be around 10-15%. 3dfx had also recognized that the Voodoo5 was lagging behind on the AMD front, and this new driver release should improve performance on AMD systems.

The new D3D Geometry Assist feature basically allows V5 users to take advantage of games with hardware T&L support. Normally, if a video card doesn't support hardware T&L, the card may be forced to run on Microsoft's software T&L engine instead. Geometry Assist replaces Microsoft's software T&L with 3dfx's engine (it basically helps with the triangle setup).

Test System Setup

AMD Athlon 1.1GHz
Abit KT7-RAID motherboard
Mushkin 128MB PC133 CAS2 SDRAM
Western Digital Caviar ATA-66 hard drive

3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP
Driver version: 1.03

3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP
Driver version: 1.01

Win98SE

Benchmarks

3DMark2000 1.1 - 800x600x16
3DMark2000 1.1 - 800x600x32
3DMark2000 1.1 - 1024x768x16
3DMark2000 1.1 - 1024x768x32

Unreal Tournament 428 Glide - 800x600x16
Unreal Tournament 428 Glide - 1024x768x16

Unreal Tournament 428 D3D - 800x600x16
Unreal Tournament 428 D3D - 800x600x32
Unreal Tournament 428 D3D - 1024x768x16
Unreal Tournament 428 D3D - 1024x768x32

Quake 3 1.17 - 640x480 Fastest, High Quality
Quake 3 1.17 - 800x600 Fastest, High Quality
Quake 3 1.17 - 1024x768 Fastest, High Quality
Quake 3 1.17 - 1280x1024 Fastest, High Quality
Quake 3 1.17 - 1600x1275 Fastest, High Quality

Notes

Readers asked for an update with AMD and FSAA numbers, so we broke out a 1.1GHz AMD Athlon and ran tests with and without FSAA. We also took another look at Geometry Assist in 3DMark 2000.