Review: 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP (Page 3/6)

Posted: September 21, 2000
Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen

T-Buffer (cont.)

Other notable features include depth-of-field blur, which is often used in films to focus attention on something. When you’re looking at something close up to you, everything further away seems blurry and when you’re looking at something far away, whatever’s close to you is blurry. This is depth-of-field blur. However, I don’t seem to find much use for it in FPS games. Let’s say you have something close to you and something far away, how does the game engine know what you intend on looking at to focus on and blur out everything else? This has to be controlled manually and I think the constant shifting between blur-in and blur-out can cause headaches. That’s just what I think though.

Motion blur occurs when something moves, you don’t see it clearly until it slows down. The faster the object moves, the blurrier it becomes. Or, the faster you move, the blurrier your close surroundings become. Soft shadows allow the edges of shadows to appear more soft and gradient like real life shadows. Soft reflections, well, that’s now self-explainable. It allows reflections to appear blurry.

These are all very promising effects and are often found in films. Let’s hope these cool effects migrate into other cards from other manufacturers.

Let’s cut the chase and go straight to the benchmarks shall we?

Benchmark System:

3dfx Voodoo5 5500 with 1.01.00 drivers.

Intel Celeron 2 600MHz @ 900MHz
Abit BE6-II, latest BIOS
192MB NEC Cas2 133MHz @ 100MHz
13GB Ultra33/5400 Maxtor HD
Diamond Monster Sound MX300

MadOnion 3DMark 2000

16-bit: 800x600, 1024x768
32-bit: 800x600, 1024x768

Quake 3 Arena with latest Point Release
1024x768
1280x1024
1600x1200
Modes: Fastest, Normal, High Quality, Maximum.

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