Since the publication of this article, a few readers have pointed out that V5 5500 AGP functions in single chip mode at 1600x1200. Brian Burke has confirmed this to be the case. This, rather than shared frame buffer access, is the likely reason for V5's poor performance at 1600x1200.
- Kert Chian

This article takes an in-depth look at the 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP graphics card in comparison to the NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS graphics card. These are the system settings:

System settings:

Windows 98 Pentium III 600 MHz 128 MB PC100 SDRAM Voodoo5 5500 AGP 64 megabytes of single data rate SDRAM (166/166) Driver version: 4.12.01.543 NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS DDR 32 megabytes of double data rate SDRAM (200/333) Driver version: 4.12.01.0530

The Voodoo5 5500 card consists of two 166MHz VSA-100 graphics processors, each allocated with 32 megabytes of 166MHz SDRAM. Each graphics processor has an exclusive texture memory pool. Framebuffer storage and access, however, are shared between the processors. The circuitry that facilitates framebuffer sharing is on the back of the card (fig 2).

Fig. 1: Voodoo5 5500 front

Fig. 2: Voodoo5 5500 back, showing circuitry that allows framebuffer sharing (boxed).