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

HSR 3: Semi-Aggressive

The HSR setting of 3 gets the name "Semi-Aggressive Tiling" in nAuTiS' driver tweak. Let's see what HSR 3 does to the performance of our two cards.

As seems to be the trend, only the crippled Voodoo4 4500 gets any gain from HSR at 640x480x32. The setting of HSR 3 produced no image quality problems and resulted in a 11%. The most likely reason that the only the Voodoo4 4500 realizes performance gains at 640x480x32 with HSR enabled is due to the fact that the Voodoo5 5500 is already performing at top speed here. Not suffering the same memory bandwidth limitations that occur in the Voodoo4 4500, as the Voodoo5 5500 essentially has double the memory bandwidth due to the two VSA-100 chips, the Voodoo5 5500 can not gain so much by removing unseen polygons.

With an HSR setting of 3, we notice that both the Voodoo5 5500 as well as the the Voodoo4 4500 have some image quality problems. In the case of the Voodoo5 5500, which suffers less than the Voodoo4 4500 when it comes to image problems, the performance of the card increased by 25%, bringing it up to GeForce2 GTS speeds. The performance of the Voodoo4 4500 rose by 132%, but the resulting images were not pretty.

Finally, at 1600x1200x32, both cards become unplayable with the HSR 3 setting. We have yet to see how accurate the Quake III Arena framerate counter is when the scene is as altered as it is at this resolution, but it does show a 184% speed increase for the Voodoo5 5500 and a 233% speed increase for the Voodoo4 4500.

Unfortunately with the HSR setting of 3 we were not able to run smoothly at 800x600x32 with FSAA 2x enabled, a resolution that we were quite excited to see improve drastically without any problems with the lower HSR settings. Here, the performance of the Voodoo5 5500 with FSAA in 2x mode increased by 51% but resulted in image problems. The only resolution where image problems were not present in this case was at 640x480x32, where performance increased by 10%.