I was reading someplace that the Voodoo 5 card only runs at 1x speed in an AGP slot but that a Voodoo 4 can run at 4x. Would this actually make a single GPU V4 faster than a dual GPU V5 in some things? I've been searching for old reviews with benchmarks that have both a V4 and V5 in them and can't find any.
I'm not sure, but afaik the Voodoo's make little use of the AGP benefits anyway.
Iirc the Voodoo 4 was only little better then the Voodoo 3 3500.
The V4 was basically half a V5 [one VSA-100 instead of 2].
Presumably the main advantage is that it will run in one of those 1.5v motherboards. Though not all V4's are agp 4x apparently.
Yeah, the ability to run in a 1.5V slot is about the only actual difference between the two. The V5 is still considerably faster than the V4 in all cases.
AGP speeds generally didn't make much of a difference in performance until much later (even the 9700Pro wasn't terribly bottlenecked on 2X AGP), and especially not on the Voodoo cards, which don't really use any of the features of AGP... they pretty much just treat it as a fast PCI slot.
Generally the only time you'll notice any benefits of the faster AGP modes is when your video card has used all its onboard memory and has to share with system memory. Even then, AGP shared memory is much slower than the card's onboard memory so performance will still take a big hit even at AGP8x.
If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.
None of the Voodoo chips support AGP texturing though so AGP is particularly worthless for them.
The only advantage in this case is that AGP is a distinct bus so you aren't loading PCI down. But I don't think back then that we had hardware that was likely to saturate PCI. If you ran RAID 0 it was easy to saturate, but you aren't maxing out your HDD throughput while gaming 😀.
If Voodoo4 was more common I think it would be a better choice than Voodoo3. But I wouldn't pay much of a premium for a V4.
wrote:Generally the only time you'll notice any benefits of the faster AGP modes is when your video card has used all its onboard memory and has to share with system memory. Even then, AGP shared memory is much slower than the card's onboard memory so performance will still take a big hit even at AGP8x.
It takes a hit even with today's huge local RAM video cards. Anti aliasing gobbles up frame buffer at high resolutions, leaving less for textures, until something breaks.
