Review: 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP (Page 6/6) Posted: September 21, 2000
Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen Summing Things Up Performance:
[ 8.4/10 ]

The Performance on the Voodoo5 5500 isn’t bad like you may have been hearing. In fact, the only thing it really loses out to in terms of raw power is the GeForce2 GTS, and now Ultra. But if you think about it, a lot of really cool and innovative features are built into the VSA-100 chips. FSAA performance is still better than any other card out there.

Innovation:
[ 9.1/10 ]

Okay, so it’s not the fastest champ, but you have to admit, the Voodoo5 does have really cool features that I would like to see in other cards and upcoming cards. I mean, if the GeForce2 had true hardware FSAA, depth-of-field blur, motion blur, and the rest of the cool features that the Voodoo5 has, then GeForce2 would be a dream. But it doesn’t have those features. The Voodoo5 has some very exciting technology in it folks.

Installation and Setup:
[ 9.5/10 ]

What card installs itself? No card at all.

Bundle:
[ 7.0/10 ]

Well I got a CD full of utilities and drivers and a press kit CD. You of course won’t get this. And no game bundle is somewhat disappointing. The manual is okay. It’s not too detailed on anything, but then again, installing a video card doesn’t take much.

Price:
[ 8.3/10 ]

Overall: [ 8.4/10.0 ]

At the time of writing you can find the Voodoo5 5500 AGP on www.pricewatch.com for $248US. That’s really not that bad. But considering that you can find a Leadtek WinFast GeForce2 GTS 32MB for roughly the same price, it’s hard to say. It’s your call between features, speed, and price. Conclusion 3dfx has done a pretty good job of catching up to where everyone is, but not totally. For example, most vendors are packing hardware T&L into their chips, yet even the Voodoo5 6000 doesn’t have T&L. T&L is one of the few reasons why the GeForce2 GTS beats the Voodoo5 5500 in raw speed. For first person shooter games, I’d have to recommend a GeForce2 GTS. But for other games like racing sims, flight sims, and or other non fast paced, fast action games, I’d have to go for Voodoo as its FSAA is simply stellar.

It really does depend on you, your PC, and what you play. For FPS games, you need a high frame rate. In other games, you don’t need massive frame rates to play properly. I’m talking about the kind of games mentioned above. If I didn’t play first person shooters, I’d rather have my games look exquisite in full FSAA.

Once again, thanks for reading and if you have any questions and or comments, join us: #tweak3d on EFnet, IRC. First Page