3dfx's new Voodoo5 5500 AGP card has begun to receive industry acclaim, just days after the card's official release. FiringSquad, a site dedicated to reviewing hardware and gaming software, has praised the new Voodoo card for its implementation of Full Screen Anti-Aliasing (FSAA). The FSAA technology effectively smoothes edges and produces more realistic 3D images. According to 3dfx:
3dfx Interactive® Inc. (NASDAQ:TDFX) today announced the company's four sample full-scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) delivered by the new Voodoo5 5500 was praised by FiringSquad as delivering the best image quality in the popular APIs of any graphics accelerator. FiringSquad is the leading website for hardware and game reviews and is considered a major opinion shaper among game industry consumers. A three-part series of stories detailed the results of three weeks of exhaustive head to head testing. Put to the test were the industry's two leading graphics accelerators with FSAA support: the Voodoo5 5500 AGP from 3dfx and the GeForce2 GTS from NVIDIA.
"The 4x comparison wasn't even a contest. The Voodoo 5 simply owned," said Sarju Shah, Games and Hardware Writer from FiringSquad. "There was very little doubt in our minds as to which card had the best FSAA in the 4x tests."
Results revealed that in games using Microsoft's popular Direct3D API, Voodoo5 was the overwhelming favorite. In games using the OpenGL API, the results were very close. The two cards exhibited near-equivalent FSAA image quality with a slight edge in performance going to 3dfx using equivalent settings.
"NVIDIA has finally implemented D3D FSAA on their board, but after hours of comparison, we have to say that NVIDIA's FSAA doesn't beat 3dfx in an 'apples-to-apples' comparison," Shah concluded. "When it came to D3D there was no confusion. Performance was far superior on the Voodoo."
The new Voodoo5 5500 AGP is available for Windows for US$299. A PCI based Mac version is expected to be released this summer. You can find more information at the 3dfx web site.
