3dfx Voodoo5 5500

Quake 3 Arena Performance - AMD Athlon 750

The GeForce line absolutely dominates the benchmark standings at 640x480, most likely due to their hardware T&L engine. Note the minimal performance drop when moving to 32-bit for the Voodoo5. At least at this res, it has plenty of memory bandwidth to go around. Interestingly, even the venerable TNT2 Ultra is able to beat out the Voodoo5 5500 at this low resolution, showing that the Voodoo5 drivers are probably still immature.

At 800x600, the Voodoo5's memory bandwidth begins to flex its muscle as its able to beat out the GeForce SDR and GeForce 2 MX in 32-bit color. The GeForce DDR is still faster, however, thanks to the combination of T&L and better drivers.

At 1024x768x16, the Voodoo5 5500 beats out everything but the DDR based GeForce models. It actually steps slightly ahead of the GeForce DDR in 32-bit color, once again thanks to better memory bandwidth.