3dfx Driver Build 1.04.01: Increased Performance and Hidden Surface Removal (HSR) for the Voodoo4 and Voodoo5

HSR 2: Non-Aggressive Tiling

The second most aggressive HSR setting is an HSR of 2, named "Non-Aggressive Tiling" in the HSR.reg file. Let's see how this setting affected performance as well as gameplay.

Once again, pushing up the HSR setting resulted in a slight gain for the Voodoo4 4500 but no gain for the Voodoo5 5500. The Voodoo4 4500 was able to gain 7.6 FPS or 9% without any image quality problems.

At HSR 2 at 1024x768x32, we see that both the Voodoo4 4500 as well as the Voodoo5 5500 produce image quality problems, with the problems in the Voodoo4 4500 being worse than those in the Voodoo5 5500. Although we must take these results with a grain of salt because the game approaches unplayable at these settings, the Voodoo5 5500 gains 22% performance and the Voodoo4 4500 gains 87%.

At 1600x1200x32, both cards render unplayable games with an HSR setting of 2. It is too bad that the performance of the cards increases by 46% in the Voodoo5 5500 and 143% in the Voodoo4 4500.

Once again, the FSAA 2x results prove to be quite exciting. With FSAA enabled on the Voodoo5 5500, the card sees no image quality problems at 800x600x32 but performs 38% higher. At 1024x768x32 we noted some image problems but the speed of the card increased by 79%.