The Specs: I won’t go into detail here, but I will direct you to the stats over at 3dfx's web site—I figure that reinventing the wheel is a bit pointless. What I will go into is that there are effectively 3 AA settings: no Anti-Alaiasing, 2xAA and 4xAA. No Anti-Alaiasing is what we're all used to—jagged edges. 2xAA is a lower quality setting (but still better than no Anti-Alaiasing at all) that cleans the images, and 4xAA is the full bore image quality setting. Sometimes there are minimal difference between 2x and 4x, but I've included an animated gif from Fly! to illustrate the difference.
Drivers: A painless install under Win98; no real Win 2000 drivers yet, but they should be available before the end of June. However the card works fine, but with out the Anti-Alaiasing features under Win2000 using Voodoo drivers.
I found myself digging up my old games with the exception of FS98- my CD is damaged beyond repair and quite the coaster. But I pulled out F-15, PP99 and EAW. My results are not going to be scientific but I'll be honest, performance/framerates are not the issue on my P3/550 anyhow.
This card renders images that are visually stunning—Playing titles at 640x480 became very livable (and fast!)—I usually can't stand low-res images with all the jagged edges and correspondingly larger/magnified scenes. As you can see by some of my images (do check all of them out) the edges are very clean—especially in the F-18 shots and in the images of the C172. Even at higher resolutions, the effect is noticeable. The stills don't tell the story here at all—one really needs to see FSAA in motion and see the disappearance of pixel swim and runways with edges that look more convincing.
The Voodoo5 is incredible in Glide. The real test being Fly! Which has native support for Glide and Direct 3d. I’ve found that the frame rates hover from ~17(1024x768x32 with the Hawker panel) to 25 or so with the mini panel, quite flyable, and the only thing that will improve matters is a faster CPU. In fact, flight sims are by their nature very CPU intensive and usually leave the video card starved for data where shooters usually are waiting on the video card.
Here’s my report on a few titles by paragraph. Some good news, some bad.
Fly! looks great in both 16-bit (frame rates in the 50’s most of the time) and in 32-bit mode. The performance is not an issue- it’s plenty fast. The FSAA cleans up some of the edges as you can see. The voodoo5 is an excellent choice for Fly!
FS2000: Here we run into our first bug- FSAA does not appear to work at all! I’ve even contacted 3dfx on this one and they confirm it- no FSAA here. Performance is definitely CPU bound- frame rates are identical to my Voodoo3. If you’re hoping for help here, get a faster processor. At this time there is no fix, but this could be resolved in a driver revision.
Falcon 4: Wow! Time to fly a painting. The images here are incredible and the comparison shots only begin to do these effects justice. I almost fell over when I first saw these images (and I took the screenshots) This is absolutely a winner- so much so that I forgot that I had turned down the resolution for testing! If you like Falcon4 Get this card ASAP. Really.
PP99: Yes it’s old in software years, but I found something interesting- the only graphic artifact that disappeared is the moiré effect of closely spaced lines. Other than that, it seems that PP99 has edge antiAliaising built into the code. Not much effect here, and once again off of my hard drive.
Janes F-18: With AA, the aircraft visuals are almost photographic, without, they look rendered. I noticed the effects most when looking over my shoulder toward the wingtips, and when I was on deck. Nice job here. Overall not as pretty as Falcon4 but not underwhleming. The cockpit is cleaned up measurably with AA on and all of the text is clear.
EAW: Where have you been all my life? FSAA makes the standard resolution look far better, and certainly no longer looks like 640x480. Distant formations look like formations of aircraft now instead of batwings or seagulls. Overall a Wow here.
I also did some non standard things as well – Flight Gear did not run full screen for me, but I'm probably the first to run FG on a Voodoo5 at all. X-plane hums along with all the details on so OpenGL support appears not to be a factor. More good performance in 3d Studio as well, but I did not benchmark here.
2d performance is still as good as it gets—all of my screens are clear and crisp on my 17” Sony at 1280x1024 (I can't go higher!)
To cut to the chase, I'd recommend this card to any gamer. The overall performance is not quite as fast in raw form as the nVidia GeForce2, but all of the effects are unavailable there (Geforce supports Anti Aliasing, but in software), so this almost becomes an apples to oranges comparison.
The new effects of FSAA up the ante on 3d rendering for desktop systems. For $300USD, one can have a video card that takes the first step toward giving us games that look like “Toy Story” but still play acceptably. Yes there is a price for these effects, but the hit is minor in flight sims and is more than made up for in quality. I found that the best compromise is to use 2xAA at higher resolutions but I admit that I'm cranking things and turning the detail down at 1024 in all of my games if possible. You’ll find yourself revisiting some of your older titles and learning to love them again. Once you go FSAA, there is no going back. It's almost as noticeable as going from black and white to color—It's that good.
Other (P)reviews:
Previews of 3dfx / Voodoo cards are available at these web sites:
Anandtech
FiringSquad
HardOCP
