3dfx Voodoo4 4500 & Voodoo5 5500 Preview

This is a perfect example of the immaturity of 3dfx's drivers. Shortly after the Voodoo4/5's release (with any hope) these scores should be up around the GeForce scores at 640 x 480 since the card is far from being fill rate limited.

As the fill rate advantage of the Voodoo5 begins to kick in it jumps up a bit in the chart however the drivers are still holding it back although NVIDIA's hardware T&L is also giving the GeForce the advantage at this low of a resolution.

Updated drivers should help performance here a little bit as well.

At 1024 x 768 we are seeing fill rate become more of an issue which is why the 5500 creeps up to the performance of the GeForce DDR and its 64MB counterpart. One thing must be explained here, the 64MB DDR GeForce is actually performing below that of the 32MB DDR GeForce because we are testing using the new 5.16 drivers (which will be used with the GeForce 2 GTS), these drivers enable S3TC on the GeForce cards which makes 32MB more than enough for texture storage in Quake III Arena. This combined with the fact that the 32MB DDR cards feature DDR SGRAM which is (slightly) faster than the DDR SDRAM on the 64MB cards explains the performance differences you'll see that give the 32MB card the small advantage in most cases.

When switching to 32-bit color, the DDR GeForce is fill rate limited at 1024 x 768 x 32 whereas the Voodoo5 5500 can still pull ahead courtesy of its higher fill rate.

The 4500 is pretty disappointing, it is going to have to be much cheaper than a GeForce in order for it to be a contender this late in the game.