 Voodoo 5 5500
3dfx's hottest flagship
Manufacturer
- 3dfx/STB
Saturday, August 05, 2000 - Hilbert Hagedoorn
3dfx recently released their new flagship the Voodoo5 5500. With a new
graphics processor (may I say GPU ?) they have made a fine addition from it's predecessor
the Voodoo3 series videocard. The Voodoo5 finally has full support for 32Bit
color in games, has a new feature (T-Buffer) and of course has improved
performance. The new generation Voodoo cards is built around 3dfx's hottest chip
called the VSA-100. The advantage of this chip is simply that it can be coupled/combined
in SLI mode (a feature that we already knew from the Voodoo2 series videocards).
Theoretically you can place up-to 32 VSA-100 chips on a videocard. Considering that each chip uses 15 Watts and needs 32Mb memory we might as well
buy an
external generator next to the PC for such a card LOL! The Voodoo5 5500
AGP we tested sports two 166MHz VSA-100 processors. The Voodoo4 will have one
VSA-100 and
Voodoo 5 6000 will sport 4 VSA-100 processors.
This gives the Voodoo5 5500 AGP a
theoretical 667Mpps (million pixels per second) fill-rate and a theoretical 667
Mtps (million texels per second) rate.
Specifications
Integrated 128-bit 3D/2D
VSA-100 processor (x2)
64MB SDRAM 32MB per VSA-100 processor
166MHz/166MHz core/memory clock
Dual pixel pipeline
667Mpixels/s fill rate
1X/2X/4X AGP with full sideband support
32-bit rendering
32-bit textures
2024x2024 texture size support
Single-cycle trilinear mipmapping
24-bit floating point depth buffer (Z and W)
DirectX texture compression and 3dfx FXT1 texture compression
T-buffer technology:
Depth-of-field blur
Motion blur
2X and 4X FSAA
Soft Shadows
Soft Reflections
128-bit Windows GUI accelerator
350MHz RAMDAC
Planar-to-packed-pixel digital video format conversion (DVD Hardware
assist)
Coming up: the
videocard review ...
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