Any opinions on whether I should replace my V5 with Radeon LE?

[Pauli]

I have a V5 currently on my P3700@933. I run Win2K and Win98SE (different hard drives with caddy - not dual boot). All games are run on Win98SE setup - UT, MechWarrior Vengeance, WW2 Fighters, Tiger Woods 2001 Golf. Mostly web surfing, CD burning, MP3s, compiling, email on the Win2K setup.
Is it worth it to replace my V5 with the Radeon LE (fully tweaked of course)? I already bought the card from Newegg, I just couldn't pass up $70 for this thing. My buddy will buy it from me if I don't use it, so no big deal.

 

[HappyGamer2]

give the radeon a try, ya never know which ones better until you do it, you do need a reason to play around and experiment don't you?
note done that been there, radeon vs V5 in my system, look below and you will see which one came out on top.

as for you buddy not wanting it after you played with it for a few days: why wouldn't he not want it, it will be tested to see if it's lemon or not, and youre not going to hurt it unless you overclock it to the max or beyond

 

[Pauli]

Thanks for your valuable experience HappyGamer2. Actually, what I meant to say about my buddy is that he will buy it from me if I don't keep it. No problem if I try it out first.

I guess I won't try it in my main system - I don't want to chance screwing up the driver installation on the V5 because everything is running pretty well now.

Would you care to elaborate on your experience with the 2 cards and why you ended up with the V5? I would appreciate your insight.

 

[EMAN]

I would rather have a voodoo 5 5500.

Wanna trade?

 

[HappyGamer2]

first off I'm running win98se only, I had a radeon 32mb ddr retail card. I went from V5 to radeon back to the V5. I kept the radeon in my system for a month to give it a fair try out. This was back in late 2000 (NOV/DEC). maybe the radeons drivers are better now????
the biggest reason why I like the V5 better? less problems in games, I had too many problems in to many games with the Radeon. a few of my old fairly unpopular games failed to play, they would crash back to deskop on loading. never happened with the V5. with some other games I had graphics issues with the radeon, 32 bit was worse that 16bit when it came graphics issues. worse that the V5.
the 16 bit quality was worse than the V5 in almost all games. and I didn't feel the radeons 32 bit was any better than the V5 in 32 bit graphics quality. it just depended on the game. some games like heavy metak fakk2 the radeon did better, faster and looked better. but overall the V5 won out or tied the radeon in most 32 bit gaming.

2d quality, 16 bit the V5 was much better, 32 bit it was very close, so it didn't matter. but still I thought the V5 was slightly better, 19" dell(sony) mon. here.

Glide, I missed it. I play a whole heap of games and find glide to be usefull, UT is one game that I missed glide, the redeon looked ugly in 16 bit d3d, and 32 bit d3d had problems. The v5 was also faster in d3d vs d3d UT wise

fsaa, same story, but no big deal since I don't use it that often, it's fine with the V5, useless on the radeon.

tribes2, never tried it out on the radeon since it came out after I dumped the radeon, but the V5 plays the game plenty good enough now with wickedGL. Note I don't play this game much, I find it to be over rated.

Quake3, looks wise it was very close, but I feel the V5 looks slightly better, and the V5 is smoother under high load conititions, no matter what the benchmarks say, yes the radeon benched higher that the V5 in my system, but that's not actual game play.

well it just depends on the games you play most, but for me The V5 won out.

 

[EMAN]

I understand where your coming from happygamer. The drivers do suck but it's gotten a lot better since December. I don't have no problems with my any games so far but I was having trouble when I first had the radeon.

Glide, I missed it. I play a whole heap of games and find glide to be usefull, UT is one game that I missed glide, the redeon looked ugly in 16 bit d3d, and 32 bit d3d had problems. The v5 was also faster in d3d vs d3d UT wise

I don't miss glide anymore except for those old games that I don't play anymore. That's why I got a voodoo3 just in case.

Unreal Tournament looks absolutely stunning on my Radeon using OpenGL with 2nd CD. But I get stutters when there's lot of bots in front of me. I heard the 64meg version doesn't do this. I was about to buy the radeon 64meg vivo but I thought I should wait until Radeon 2 came out.




Quake3, looks wise it was very close, but I feel the V5 looks slightly better, and the V5 is smoother under high load conititions, no matter what the benchmarks say, yes the radeon benched higher that the V5 in my system, but that's not actual game play.

How true Voodoo was always smoother than any other card in the market. My radeon does fine but voodoo is definitely smoother. I still have voodoo 3 2000 that I'm going to keep for a long time.


Personally I think the image quality on the Radeon is excellent. I think it's more colorful than Nvidia or 3dfx cards. I don't know about Kyro but I'll just stick with my radeon for now.

 

[LuciferHaze]

No, it wouldn't be a good idea as the Voodoo5 is faster than the RADEON LE. Wait awhile and upgrade to the next GeForce after the GeForce3 and then sell your Voodoo5. That's what i'ze gonna do.

 

[HappyGamer2]

Eman, I did get the UT high res textures to work with my V5, d3d is smooth and plenty fast enough, but in ctf the flags are invisable and it's not totally stable, but it looks great. I also got it to work in opengl, it's totaly stable, the flags are visable but it doesn't look that great and it's slow.

note when using the high res texture I used to get odd slow downs, but I cured it by changing the in game cache size from 8 to a 128 mb and letting windows manage my vitual memeory instead of setting it to 256 min/max

 

[Pauli]

Thanks for all of your help. I'll stick with the V5 for awhile longer. I have to say that so far it meets my needs very well without a single problem with it. I just thought that with all of the raving going on here about the LE, it would be a step up from the V5.

 

[Wingznut]

Well, that would be the question to answer. What does your V5 NOT do for you, that you think another video card might?

 

[Pauli]

WingNUT
Well, for starters, the 3DMark2001 scores for the Radeon are almost double of what I get with the V5. So, I think it would be a substantial performance gain. I know that the 3DMark benchmark is synthetic, but I would think for D3D games, the Radeon would be faster. Perhaps I'm mistaken about this.
Secondly, the 2D and 3D visual quality for the Radeon is supposed to be excellent. But after reading some of the posts on this board, perhaps not.

 

[kazeakuma]

Looking at the games you play it probably wouldn't be worth it. I have one as well as a GF2 and a GF3 on the way but the Voodoo is never leaving my system. Incidentally, you can force 32bit rendering in Glide on UT and it looks way better, although it still doesn't use 32bit textures.

 

[gtd2000]

How does the V3 5500 perform in CS?
I'm considering Radeon LE but this could be a better deal overall if the V3 5500 is a good performer.

Somebody tell me the general frame rates at max resolution with fps_max = 100 setting - NOT with fps_max = 72 setting please

 

[AaronP]

I have both cards in 2 very similar systems (one is a P3-800 with 256 ram and the other is a Duron 700 with 256 ram) and my answer to your question is GOD NO. My Voodoo 5 BLOWS THE RADEON AWAY as far as an overall card.

However if you look at 3Dmark scores alone, a tweaked RadeonLE will beat the V5 fairly easily.