Voodoo 5 5500, Finally found its limit.....F1's 421!

[Hornit 3]

I have finally found the limit for the Voodoo 5. I have been happy so far with the superior anti aliasing capability of this card and it has given me nice frame rates with just about anything you can think of as far as add-ons go. Recently I hit the wall though with the NAMC YS-11 and now the 421 is killing it. Time to break down and get A GF4 4600! It seems that the 1024X32 bit textures are taking thier toll. The scenery(terrain) and also the aircraft textures just can't keep up and blur and smudge pretty badly. All my other games..IL-2, F4,CFS2 F-18 run very well. Its a shame as everything else looks really nice with this card, but I knew it would have to go soon. I have tried many drivers and many settings all to no avail. Just thought I would throw this out to any V5 users who might be reading. I will bury this card with honors as it has given me more than my money's worth for sure. The 421 is a superb handling aircraft and the cockpit and flight model are top notch. It still flies very well from inside, I just can't enjoy looking at that beautiful exterior!! :( For those who are curious my system is a T-bird at 1.4ghz and 512mb PC2100 on a abit KG-7 board, with SB live.Hornit

[Guest JonP01]

I too recently buried my Voodoo with honours. Almost the same scenario as well. It was working more than adequately with my other sims, but it really couldn't offer me the sort of performance and image quality I wanted out of FS2002 (and that I knew was possible to achieve). Had I not wanted better FS2002 performance, I probably would have kept the card, but even my Geforce 3 just puts the Voodoo to shame in FS2002. Funnily, I missed the anti-aliasing for the first month or so, but I don't miss it any more. Furthermore, I really appreciate what a marked difference anisotropic filtering makes to image quality. As a bonus, the Geforce has also let me try out and adopt a couple of other recent sims "designed" around Geforce cards (such as Rally Trophy).Based on my experience with the Geforce card, I have to say that I don't really think anti-aliasing is that important to me any more and that very high resolution, high bit colour, very high texture quality and anisotropic filtering are more important to image quality (at least to my eyes). Going back to the Voodoo a couple of weeks ago just for comparison purposes proved to me just how far things have come since that wonderful Voodoo 5500 card came out nearly two years ago.

[Guest]

Thanks fellas, for these comments - from a V5 user. I am a bit 'disturbed' with those blurry textures - which seem to appear in tiles - one tile being crystal clear, and it's neighbour being blurred - but I just love the V5 when it's being good.I had read hereabouts that Geforces suffer similar blurries, and was very unsure about upgrading - your observations are welcome to the decision process.PH

[Hornit 3]

I think everyone sees the blurries your talking about when the card is taxed. I just think its less of an issue with the Higher memory cards that do actual AGP, wheres the V5 isn't a true AGP card, it acts like a PCI card really. For all intensive purposes the V5 is a 32mb memory card due to the way it handles textures. I have found that its the higher texture size models that cause the V5 to fall down. Its funny but the cheyenne 400 from FSD also has 1024 size textures but it does not cause the frame rate hit, they are NOT 32bit format but are DXT1 I beleive which may make a difference to the card. I can fly the 400 around all day and have nice textures on the plane AND the terrain. Not so the 421, also I think the polygon count on the 421 is higher and this may also be the limiting factor. As models become more complex it just can't keep up. The only other big issue are the reflections, which I didnt mind as long as the textures were well done, I thought it looked great! But the more I see in screenshots, the more I long for those shiny spinners and metallic reflections:)Hornit

[Guest JonP01]

Phil,As someone who did upgrade from a Voodoo 5500 to Geforce 3, I can attest the Geforce massively reduces the "blurries". You are correct - the Voodoo seemed to "tile" the blurries quite badly. Sometimes towards the end of a flight with the Voodoo, I couldn't even discern the landscape - so badly was it blurried.After installing the Geforce 3 and tweaking a few settings, blurries (in both CFS2 and FS2002) are pretty much a thing of the past. Yes, they still happen but are so mild and few and far between that they just don't bother me anymore. It would seem that the Geforce's mip-mapping capabilities are vastly superior to the Voodoo.As someone who held onto their Voodoo almost to the very last, I can heartily recommend upgrading to a Geforce. You will miss the Voodoo anti-aliasing but this is more than made up by the better textures, colour saturation, higher resolution, colour depth and lack of blurries. At last I read all those tiny gauges!!!

[Guest]

Hi Hornit,Try these DXT3 mipmapped textures for the 421 until you upgrade your V5500. I'd be interested to know if this alleviates things for you in the interim. http://www.the-hangar.net/DXT3.zipBest,

[Hornit 3]

Roger, Ok, this has worked fairly well! Not sure why but your textures do slightly better than the ones I converted to DXT with imagetool here.There is a slight loss of detail, especially the finer lines but to me its an acceptable fix and allows me to enjoy these fine skins for now, til I upgrade. This jpg probably loses a bit of the resolution due to compression but it gets the idea across. i can even turn on clouds and weather and still have decent terrain textures!!! Thanks again and I really appreciate it!!Maybe you could do a few of the repaints too? there are some really nice ones up by Ron Hamilton already....just a thought, I KNOW you are busy. Seems your DXT conversions worked better than mine, had some black textures for some unknown reason a few times. Otherwise it worked ok for me here. I think this model has a polygon issue also compared to the Cheyene at least on my system. The Cheyene is smooooooth here:)Many thanks again Roger!! Great support!!!!http://www.flightsimmers.net/airport/hornit/421.jpg