3dfx Voodoo5 5500

Will 3dfx's VoodooMac graphics card cast a spell over Mac users?

While the world of PC graphics cards is fiercely competitive, it's a different story when it comes to the Mac. ATI practically has the market to itself - its Rage 128 and 128 Pro chips are supplied as standard by Apple, while users of older machines are offered ATI upgrade cards. However, all could be set to change as 3dfx attempts to work its magic with the VoodooMac 5500 PCI.

Designed with fast 3D in mind, the 5500 boasts 64Mb of SDRAM and two of 3dfx's VSA-100 processors running at 166Mhz. These chips work in parallel using a system known as SLI (scan line interleave), which splits the display between the processors for faster performance. The board runs so hot that each chip has its own fan, and the card needs to be plugged into the Mac's power supply for extra oomph (a cable is provided).

As well as fast graphics the Voodoo 5 is the first card to bring full scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) to the Mac. This eliminates unsightly jagged lines on screen, and the 5500 features both 2x and 4x over-sampling. Even better, 3dfx claims FSAA will work with any Mac 3D title.

FSAA is just one of the features offered by 3dfx's latest T-buffer technology. Other offshoots include the ability to create motion blur, depth of field focus, soft shadows and soft reflections. The 5500 supports all major Apple 3D APIs (Rave, Glide and OpenGL), has QuickDraw and QuickTime acceleration, and is the first Voodoo board to give 32bit colour.

In tests on our G4 with Unreal Tournament, the improvements using FSAA could be clearly seen, providing much smoother images without blurring. There is a slight drop in the average frame rate using the 4x option, but at 800 x 600 the game remained playable with an image quality normally associated with higher resolutions. Pushing the resolution further the results were still noticeable, but we had to stick with 2x to keep a healthy 30fps.

Quake III saw less improvement and frame rates plummeted to practically unplayable levels. Even running without anti-aliasing we didn't see a huge leap over Voodoo 3 cards here - you can run these older PC cards on the Mac using unsupported beta drivers from the 3dfx website. Starting at £69, they provide a much cheaper speed boost and come in both PCI and AGP flavours.

All that said, the VoodooMac 5500 PCI was clearly faster than the AGP Rage 128 Pro in our G4 when used with the latest version 1.0.1 drivers. In fact, the biggest problem with the 3dfx card is that there's isn't an AGP version.

(20th Sep 2000): 3Dfx announce an AGP version of the VoodooMac 5500. More details available from the 3Dfx Web site (link below).

3dfx 01753 502800, www.3dfx.com