K6-2 and K6-3 Upgrade Guide

FSAA - A Pleasant Surprise

Although we mentioned earlier that system speed is holding back the true speed of the higher end video cards in many of the 3D games tested above, this can be for the better. Take the Voodoo5 5500 and the Voodoo4 4500 for example. In looking at the benchmark results, the two card perform essentially identically in nearly every situation, even though the Voodoo5 5500 is essentially two Voodoo4 4500's. Why do the two go the same speed? This is because system speed is holding the Voodoo5 5500 back, preventing it from performing at its full potential. How can this be beneficial?

Well the answer to that is easy. Since the Voodoo5 5500 is exactly the same speed at the Voodoo4 4500 in the above benchmarks, essentially disabling one of the chips on the Voodoo5 5500 will result in the same speed (since this card would then be a Voodoo4 4500). How can we use this to our benefit? Simple: enable 2x FSAA.

By enabling 2x FSAA the Voodoo5 5500 has to work twice as hard to render a given scene, meaning that it would then perform at the Voodoo4 4500 speed. Since the two speeds are identical (the full Voodoo5 5500 speed and the Voodoo4 4500 speed), enabling 2x FSAA would result in no framerate loss, essentially resulting in free FSAA.

The same cannot really be said about the GeForce 2 GTS, as this card does not match the speed of any other card we tested. Enabling FSAA on the GTS would most likely result in a TNT2 Ultra speed card. Still not too bad and in some cases still faster than the Voodoo4 4500. And while a GeForce2 Ultra is basically an overkill for a K6-2/3 system, you can pretty much be assured that the Ultra would be able to play games at FSAA 2X with nearly GeForce2 MX speeds.