Hey,

Can anyone please explain in plain english what's the difference between the voodoo4 4500agp and the v5 5500agp?

I already know that the V5500 is twice faster than the 4500, and that the V4 is the only card that works on new motherboards (due to being AGP4x), but i'm asking for other info besides that :) (if any?)

Well, I'll try to give a summary :

Voodoo4 4500 :
- 32MB
- 4x AGP (3dfx reference design only)
- 1x VSA100 @ 166MHz
- max. 2x FSAA
- Fillrate : 333MPixels/sec

Voodoo5 5500 :
- 64MB (32MB per VSA100)
- 2x AGP
- 2x VSA100 @ 166MHz
- max. 4x FSAA
- Fillrate : 667MPixels/sec
- supports T-Buffer cinematic Effects
(Motion Blur, Depth of Field, Soft Shadows, Soft Reflections)
- requires internal Power Connector
- 2nd VSA-100 only active during 3D Display (unless deactivated in 3dfx Tools)
- considerably larger Card ;)

In very rare cases, the Voodoo5's SLI design has lead to compatibility issues with Games, but AFAIK, they were all resolved at some point in time.

Alrighty thanks falconfly :)

The features loss isn't that big of a deal, t-buffer isn't much used anyway, and the fsaa... well.. beats edge aliasing atleast ;)

But the performance hit is the real biggy here :( though i guess running a voodoo4 on a .. say Athlon64 system kind of compensates for the missing VSA?  8) ;D

Unfortunately, the missing performance really takes a hit especially when heavy Polygon counts are used per scene...

With the Card's "Geometry Limit" reached, not even the mightly Athlon64 can sqeeze much more performance out of the Voodoo4, since it is clearly the bottleneck then :-/

I elaborated on a possible solution a little bit here :
http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=218

Woah :o if someone could make something like that (dborca maybe? ;D) it would be really awesome.

I don't recon this was ever implemented in any card (if my memory serves me right) so this could actually be a whole new technology, way cool :o

Do you know if any work was done in that field yet falcon?

Martin, if that's a completely original idea, and if it's very useful and efficient, I say you patent it ASAP...

Well, since the Idea is extremely close to the functionality of Truform/N-Patches, I don't think it could be patented ;)

Simply see of it as a "one-way Truform" (reduction only) for 3dfx (or basically, all non-Hardware T&L Cards), with the exeption being : doesn't require any special support from the  Game/Application itself, so it would always work.

Yeah..

Like.. HSR... but...
Faster Better Stronger  ;D