V5-5500, I was hoping for better...

[NOX]

Hmm...this is so wired! I brought home one of my brother?s retail V5 boards to try out on my home system (T-Bird 700Mhz/ASUS K7M).

After loading up all the drivers (and yes the ?Voodoo5 drivers?, I also have the mini AGP port drivers installed) I ran some Q3A demo001 at 1024x768 16-bit med detail, sync off, and only got 54.3FPS (FSAA off). With FSAA on I would only get 50FPS, and on my G400MAX I would get 47FPS, not much less then the V5.

So now I wanted to see what it could do in CS/HL, multiplayer games. I went to DiamondsMM gaming server (68), the first thing I noticed was the text was really blurred out (OGL and D3D), it was very hard to see the names. When I got into the game to my surprise it was choppy as hell, and the card would not do anything over 53FPS, it would stay at, and around 33FPS the whole time (again FSAA off). With FSAA on I would sometimes get down to 22FPS. On my G400MAX I would max out at 99.9FPS in almost every part of the game (CS).

Now I wanted to see if D3D would be any better, so I switch to D3D and went back to play more CS. Again, choppy as cr*p, to the point where I could not even play, seemed like it was about to lock-up on me, and so I quickly hit the Esc button.

The only positive thing I can say about this card is playing UT, I used Glide to play a few games, and boy it was smooth. FSAA was also great in UT, though I was really expecting more from this card, but it seems 3dfx needs to work on them drivers or something?

Any suggestions? I?m not planning on keeping this card in my system, noway! My G400MAX is the only card for my system; I just wanted to see if the V5 was what I thought it would be.

 

[IceStorm]

Something's wrong with your system.

Make SURE you set Q3A to 16bit render, 32bit textures. My PIII-550E OCed to 803 on an Asus P3V4X was fine in Q3A. Think the timedemo in 1280x1024 mode was 60FPS. Even Anand's own benches on an Athlon 750 show better results that you're getting.

HL and CS have known issues with video drivers. Install the Wicked3D MiniGL driver from www.wicked3d.com . I play at 4x FSAA, 800x600 (HL DM), and my framerates are in the 55 to 100 FPS range. w/out FSAA, at 1280x960, it's at the 65 to 100 FPS range.

There's also a tweak guide at www.tweak3d.net that may help.

I like my G400 MAX, but it's better as a multimonitor card for my work system, not as a game card. The V5's much better at gaming.

Just my $0.02

 

[Panther]

yeah, your scores seem kinda low.

check out http://www.3dfxgamers.com apparantly alot of people are running half-life/cs very smoothly with FSAA, I think the key is to select the default opengl renderer. Anyway you can find all those answers at the above links' message board.

good luck...

 

[NOX]

Yeah, they are a bit to low, and I don't know why it's so low on my system. I did visit 3dfxgamers before I installed the V5, and it seemed the most popular setup was to install the VOODOO5 drivers from off the disk. People were saying their got much better scores using that setup. Most of the scores I've seen on 3dfxgamers aren?t much higher then what I'm getting. At the most I think I saw 7FPS higher using the same resolution.

Please don't get me wrong, I really like the V5 card, well, I like all cards (Matrox more though). If I were a UT gamer, played UT all the time then I would really keep this card in my system. UT really kicks a** on the V5. But for the rest of my games not so.

 

[timelord Bateman]

You have a Thunderbird on K7M??
How? Is it a Slot A version or does a converter exist?
I was hoping to get a T-Bird myself but haven't seen any Slot A versions around here...
Also are there any compatibility problems with the K7M and T-Birds?

I had a Voodoo 5500 earlier this week and got nothing like 50fps with FSAA enabled on Quake3...
if I remember correct I got as lousy FPS as 30 (1024x768x16) or something like that when FSAA was enabled.
Now I have a GeForce 2 and my frame rates took a dive from what I got with Voodoo 5500...
sh_t out of luck I'd say.

The worst about Voodoo 5500 (besides no NT 4.0 drivers) was how it ran Monaco GPRS2...
the game is from 1998 and ran nicely on my PCI TNT but was choppy with Voodoo 5500... nothing helped that...
go figure. UT was amazing with Voodoo 5500 though.

 

[Aboroth]

I have used FSAA 2x and 4x in Counterstrike and the text is not blurry at all. In D3D mode the text looks hazier than OpenGL, but that isn't because of FSAA, that happens even without it and with other cards.
Oh yeah, this is with a V5 5500 on a P3 650@866.

 

[NOX]

The Slot-A T-Birds seem to be running better on the Irongate chipset (751AMD). It runs 100% stable.

 

[dc9mm2]

NOX i got with my 5500 with FSSA off at same settings as you 76.2 FPS
With FSSA on at 2X I got 52.2 FPS using time demo 001
I have a pentium 550e running at 803 on a Asus P3V4X.
Now from what i have read the Thunderbird 700 is at least as fast as a 700 Pentium 3 so mayber my extra 100 meg/hrtz makes the differnce.
But i aslo did it at 1280 by 1024 the highest my monitor goes and got 64.5 FPS ,FSSA off. Plus i did this while my browser was open to this web page and had a firewall program running along with clean sweep 3.0 and Mcfee anti virus running in task bar. I would say something needs changing?? Plus i have the LOD adjustment which sharpens up the image quality set at -4 .
Any way, if your a Quake 3 nut, buy a Geforce 2 because thats the card for that game.
Games i play look way way better with the Voodoo 5500 and get plenty of FPS with FSSA on 4X. Falcon 4.0, Microsofts Combat Sim, Jane WW2 fighters , Mec Warrior 3 all look much better and have more than enough FPS.
So if Quakes is your game get a Geforce 2, no question it has much higher FPS. And its such a fast game you cant look at anything any ways.