3dfx Voodoo4 4500AGP

CPU Scaling Performance

We purposefully benchmark all of the cards on a fairly high performance platform, in this case a 1.1GHz Thunderbird, in order to gain an understanding for the uncapped performance of the solutions. However, not everyone has a 1.1GHz processor so in order to get a better idea for what CPU speeds are necessary to get the most out of the card, we look to a CPU scaling graph to see how the card performs with various CPUs

The Voodoo4 4500 definitely likes the faster CPUs. The performance increase you see when going from a Celeron 433 with the Voodoo4 to a Pentium III 500E is almost 20% more than the performance improvement we saw with the ATI Radeon SDR, although the Radeon SDR came out faster.

After the Pentium III 500E however the Voodoo4 4500 scales much like the Radeon SDR, with the jump to a 750MHz Duron yielding an 18% performance improvement.

Depending on the games you are looking to play, CPU may or may not be a very important factor. It's obvious by the CPU Scaling graph that the sweet spot for the Voodoo4 4500, like the Radeon SDR, is around the 600 - 750MHz range. An Athlon, Duron or Pentium III running at those speeds would be perfect for most first person shooters. The only time when you're going to possibly need more CPU power is if you're playing a flight simulator or a complex 3D adventure/RPG game, in which case you might want to pay more attention to getting a faster CPU.