Customer Reviews

3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I am sick and tired of stupid marketing words like FPS, mtexels/sec, fill rate, and mip-mapping.

It's all junk and worthless.

I bought this card because the GeForce cards are very picky about motherboards and voltage settings. I don't know about you, but I don't have the time nor the inclination to change my voltage settings or AGP aperture size.

The V5 installed in 1 minute and it hasn't crashed on me once since I started using it.

I play Unreal Tournament all the time now with all the details maxed out and it never slows down.

Get this card if you are sick and tired of computer add-ons not working and spending time on msg boards looking for answers to ridiculous questions.

The card is easy to install, stable, and will run any game you have smoothly.

That's it, it's just that simple.

...you really can't go wrong with this card. You may find it difficult to get acceptable frame rates with 4x FSAA in some of the most punishing games, but when you can use it the results are mind boggling. It even lets you force ANY Glide games to run in 32 bit color. Anybody up for some Unreal Tournament in 32 bit color with ultra smooth "Glide" framerates? I thought so. As far as raw speed goes, the Voodoo 5 is technically just a hair behind the GeForce2 cards, yet does it really matter? With the Voodoo 5 you get REAL FSAA and 32 bit Glide support at a slightly cheaper price. Finally, the hardware DVD assist does a fine job. I'm watching movies in 1152x864 with no frame dropping. Previously I had a TNT(1) running DVD's at 800x600 and the Software decoder relied entirely on my P III 450. It was really sad to see the Matrix with severe frame dropping. As a test, I rented it again and it plays perfectly with the Voodoo 5. You've seen the benchmarks, you've seen the hype, now see it for yourself. You can't go wrong with this card. Naturally, better cards are always on the way, but you have to choose to buy sometime or you will be waiting forever.

While it may be a very intresting war between the v5 and GeForce2 fans. Keep this in mind. On almost ALL socket7 boards the nVidia boards draw to much juice off the motherboard causing brownouts and resolution fading on the load of your OS. The Voodoo5 5500 has a cable that jacks INTO your powersupply to eliminate that feed problem. Thus this board is a Socket7 friendly board.. That and it just PLAIN RIPS. I got one.. and for those of you who want to actually ENJOY THE GRAPHICS and not just pure frames.. go with Voodoo5.. GeForce2 is just plain ugly in comparison. Voodoo all the way baby.

Four Words - Full Screen Anti-Aliasing (FSAA). This card does it the best. The drivers are rock-solid, and FSAA works with every game I own, in Direct3D or Glide. What's more, FSAA makes older games look better, which is important to me as I check out the bargin bin every now and again. Although the Geforce2 is faster, it's also more expensive, doesn't work with as many games, and it's FSAA isn't as good.

If you have never seen FSAA in motion, it removes the jagged edges in 3D games, making the game look like it is running at a much sharper resolution than it actually is. Depending on the game, this makes a big difference. For example, Homeworld has a lot of straight-line laser beams contrasting sharply with the darkness of space, and is hugely improved with FSAA. Older games that don't support high resolutions will look sharp as a whistler with 4x FSAA. Newer games with more detail and thus more edges will also benefit.

FSAA is not the same as turning up the resolution. Running a game at 640x480 with 4x FSAA looks better than 1200x800, because the basic problems of any resolution are effectively erased. However, FSAA won't make distance objects have the same detail as a super high resolution, but unless you are a hardcore online sniper, you'll prefer the FSAA. However, FSAA will do nothing for old, blurry textures. They will look exactly the same as before. If there are jagged edges inside a texture, they will remain.

The Voodoo5 5500 also supports 32 bit color and large texture compression, although I still am not finding a lot of games that support large textures yet. It doesn't support hardware T&L, but no game supports this fully yet. Also, the card is BIG - like Sound Blaster 16 big. Get the measurements, and check the size of your computer case before you buy it.

I'm running a system with an ASUS P3V4X board, a Celeron 300a @ 464, 128MB RAM, and I was excited though still somewhat skeptical over this new product from 3dfx when I removed my venerable Voodoo3 and installed the Voodoo5. Just like the Voodoo3, the Voodoo5 installed without incident. With the exception of a couple display problems in Half-Life that I solved after a few adjustments this newest addition to the 3dfx line is a winner.

Admittedly I wasn't very convinced about FSAA at first, having to rely on screenshots and comments from many "experts" who've never seen the card in action, and I was also tempted by the speed of the Voodoo5's competitor GeForce 2.

Well, after installing the 3dfx Tools software, and firing up the 4-sample FSAA I was stunned at what I saw.

The magnificent vistas in the games Jedi Knight and Rogue Squadron were shockingly realistic, closeups of the Imperial Walkers and TIE Fighters were so impressive I can only describe them as jaw-dropping.

Half-Life, terrifying enough as it was, took on a whole new aspect, especially on the inter-dimensional levels.

The racing games Beetle Buggin and Episode 1: Racer were phenomenal. You get the impression that you're watching a movie, seeing the mountains in the distance and the crowds in the stands as you zoom by.

Even older games like GLQuake became enjoyable once again once FSAA was turned on.

I was slightly disappointed that my Quake 3 framerates did not improve very much, but much to my delight I can now turn up the resolution to 1280x1024, or turn on 4XFSAA at 640x480 and see almost no decrease in frame rates. The lower resolution (640x480) with 4xFSAA easily beats the higher one (1280x1024) as far as visual quality in my opinion.

The compatibility of the Voodoo line is still present, and the Glide API support too. In fact I can play Rogue Squadron at 1280x1024 and 4xFSAA in Glide mode and it looks and plays beautifully.

I suppose I could have paid more for a GeForce 2 and gotten faster frame rates in Quake3, but given what this card has done to my gaming experience I will never play a game without FSAA again. I turned it off once and I was just aghast as to how ugly the games looked in comparison.

Now for the cons. This is a rather large card and people with smaller cases may need to fiddle with their hardware to make it fit. My card just barely does, just brushing the back of the cable connecting my hard drive. The drivers are also rather new, although from what 3dfx has done with their Voodoo3 drivers I'm certain they'll get a lot better with time. Finally, there's no TV-out, or game bundle with the card, but it does have a free DVD software offer for S&H costs.

The 3dfx online forums and toll-free tech support were also very helpful, and I got a few tips for my card that were invaluable.

To summarize, I was simply blown away. Not since my original Voodoo 1 card was I ever so impressed with anything from a consumer graphics company.

Don't let the naysayers dissuade you from at least checking out this card. It's amazing what kind of false information is out there, even on some of the reviews I've seen here.

The Voodoo5 is simply astounding.

The Voodoo 5 5500 AGP is one of the best overall video cards i have ever seen, with its 2D and 3D capabilitys outstanding, the 64megs of onboard SDRAM and two seprate processors. This is a great card if you need both a good 3D card (for graphics and games) and 2D card (for MPEGS, Quicktime, or Windows Media files). Along with its great price it is defenatly worth it. But if you want an even stronger card buy the Voodoo 5 6000 AGP which will be almost twice as much as the 5500. Personally i would go for the 5500.

3dfx's Voodoo5 5500 is a masterpiece of silicon engineering. This final iteration of the venerable Voodoo Graphics core has been reworked and retooled into the VSA-100 chip (Voodoo Scalable Architecture). The board uses two VSA-100 chips in SLI (Scanline Interleave Mode) and comes equipped with 64MB of SDRAM. The core clock speed runs at 166MHz while the RAMDAC refreshes at 350MHz. It can process two pixels per clock which means it has a maximum theoretical fill rate of 667 megatexels per second.

The Voodoo5 5500 finally supports a full OpenGL driver as well 32-bit true color in 3D. Additionally it also supports 3dfx's exclusive T-Buffer technology, which allows for visual tricks such as softshadows, depth-of-field blur, motion blur, and soft reflections. The biggest feature touted is it's hardware-based full scene anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing is a feature that smoothes out jagged lines in a 3D game scene, allowing for a much more realistic image. However, there's a performance hit when this feature is enabled; thus 3dfx gives the user the option of using 2X or 4X anti-aliasing. Basically this means that either two or four samples are jittered together to smooth out the scene. Games look magnificent with this feature enabled but flight sims, space combat sims, and racing sims seem to enjoy higher frame rates with it enabled also.

Nvidia's GeForce2 GTS-based cards are faster in terms of raw performance and they even support anti-aliasing. The difference is that it's not supported in hardware (it's software based) and it doesn't work as well in Direct3D as it does in OpenGL; 3dfx's solution works well in OpenGL, Glide, and Direct3D and it works with nearly every game currently available. Moreover, the driver suite is quite stable and the image quality is much better than any video card on the market (with the possible exception of ATI or Matrox). As a plus, you can find the card for well under the suggested retail price or $300 dollars with a little searching on the Internet.

The Voodoo5 5500 is your best bet for new video card. It's fast in 3D as well as 2D (Word, Excel), ships with stable drivers backed excellent tech support, and can be found for a cheaper price than some of the GeForce2-based cards currently out there. Get this card and begin to sing its praises!!

Let's be honest. GeForce2 is a great card but it does not compare to the oomph of Voodoo5. Yes its true that nVidia recently bought over 3Dfx but that only proves that nVidia knows the potential of their patents. The dual VSA100 chips give you a LOT of juice for the programs that actually use the power of Voodoo5.

Keep in mind that you will, invariably, notice a fine difference in everything you see, including web sites. The colors are "truer" and more vibrant. But like a new hammer do not try to view everything using the FSAA (Full Scene Anti Aliasing). One the best games I can suggest that will allow you the enjoy the revolutionary architecture of V5 is Diablo2. The game is breathtaking with the FSAA and the T-Buffer renders cinematic interludes so beautifully, you gotta see it to believe.

As someone who really does not count himself in either the nVidia or 3dfx camp, take it from me that Voodoo5 is the best card you can buy out there now.

I have had this card for sometime, and I'm constantly hearing people saying how slow this card is. I'm not sure what there problem is, but the card really flys. There have been some recent developments with the drivers for this card that look extremely promising. People have always said that the Voodoo5 5500 can't beat the Geforce2 GTS in Quake 3. We'll I have just seen some new drivers from 3DFX that enables HSR suppport that can get your FPS higher than that of a Geforce2 GTS cards when running high resolutions/color bits like 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. It also even allows game to run faster using the Voodoo5's Full Scene Antialiasing. I don't want to say that this card beats the Geforce 2 GTS in pure power, but as the drivers improves, 3DFX is giving us gamers alot more options and the possibility to acheive even better performance. So if you aren't getting this card because some guy as Babbages or at your local computer tells you it sucks, get the GTS....look at him and say "This is my money, and I'm going to get whatever card will serve me better now" And I think after you get the Voodoo5, you will be really impressed with the options and the performance of the card, not to mention how easily it is to setup and run all you favorite games!

Don't be fooled by the hype...make up your own mind and you'll see that the V5 5000 is one hella card!

l8r

As you will see in many reviews that the Voodoo 5500 doesn't have the "horsepower" of the G-Force 2 GTS. This is totally true from the speed side of the house (has a higher pixel fill rate). The difference between them is simple. If you like video games just to aimlessly run around a maze like a mouse trying to shoot other people you might want to consider the G-Force series cards. But if enjoy the effects, awesome detail and flowing graphics along with some of the most stable drivers in the industry THIS IS THE CARD FOR YOU. If you have seen my review of the Voodoo 4500 PCI card you know I like what the Voodoo series of cards can do. Since the 4500, I have upgraded my motherboard and it now supports AGP expansion. So I looked and finally bought the 5500 AGP. I cannot believe the QUALITY of the hardware and drivers! That should be 5 stars alone. The FSAA does work and some uneducated people call this "full sceen blurring" untrue. The effect FSAA has on games is incredible! 3DFX is sadly now just a page of numbers at NVIDIA corp. I have trust in them to produce cards that are diverse like continuing the Voodoo line and not just a Voodoo/G-Force hybrid. If you find this card and look at the scenes when playing a game instead of just beating it then pick it up and by the way it is less money then the older G-Force 2 GTS try and buy a GTS "PRO" or "Ultra" for the same price. Hope this helps.