3dfx Voodoo4 4500 & Voodoo5 5500 Preview

This is where the biggest performance improvement will lie, in the drivers.  It is quite obvious that the drivers we were provided with weren’t optimized for performance across the board, since the performance of the Voodoo5 at lower resolutions such as 640 x 480 was sub-par. 

At such a low resolution, there are very few factors, such as the CPU and the graphics card’s drivers, that limit the performance of a graphics card since the fill rate of the card isn’t close to being reached. 

We can expect the performance at resolutions below 1280 x 1024 to improve with updated drivers (the bulk of the improvements will occur at 640 x 480); however, at 1280 x 1024 and above, the performance should generally remain the same because we are beginning to hit the fill rate limitations of the Voodoo5 itself.

By editing a registry key, we could enable an overclocking utility in the 3dfx drivers, but our board was unable to go significantly higher than its default 166MHz clock speed.