3dfx Voodoo5 5500

Quake 3 Arena quaver.dem Performance - Athlon 750

The quaver demo is designed to show how a card handles a heavy texture load. Notice that even at 640x480x32, the cards without texture compression drop rapidly in performance.

The ATI cards are a perfect example of this. Apparently NVIDIA's texture management on the TNT2 is quite good, at least good enough to keep it performing better than most cards in 16 and 32-bit color. The Voodoo3 also does surprisingly well, but this is probably because it is limited to 256x256 textures, while the other cards have to deal with the larger textures found in the quaver demo.

The Voodoo5 is pretty far down the list, but it's 32-bit performance is still decent.

At 800x600, we see standings that look a bit more normal. All the cards without texture compression continue to fall off rapidly. The Voodoo5 continues on strong, slotting right between the GeForce 2 MX and GeForce SDR in 32-bit color.

The Voodoo5 5500 follows its previous pattern of moving up the standings as resolution goes up. At 1024x768, it's a fair amount slower than the GeForce 2 MX in 16-bit color but also quite a bit faster in 32-bit color, which is where quaver really stresses the cards. It's actually noticeably faster than a GeForce DDR in 32-bit color as well.