voodoo 4 4500...

[crohozen]

I bought a 4500 on Saturday but my new mobo and duron chip arent here yet. Does anyone enjoy this card?.. I bought it thinking that for 150 dollars it would be a good holdover for the 6000 or the nv card when it comes out what do you all think?

 

[Orbius]

It'll be a solid card, if a little underwhelming perhaps. To some people, I'm sure the 2d Quality, and general overall stability will make it a more favored solution than the Geforce MX, but in most cases the MX is definitely speedier.

 

[crohozen]

I play a lot of ut so I bought it figuring its nothing but a beefed up v3..
Do you think that would be correct or does the v4 have some clear advantages over the v3

 

[Wag]

This card was released over 1 1/2 years ago. It was called the TNT2.

Seriously, the v4500 is essentially a TNT2 with Glide and DXTC support. It's unfortunate it doesn't offer S3TC support in OGL because then it would be a decent performer in Q3A.

I'm really uncertain as to why 3dfx even bothered to release this card. They sort of snuck it out onto the shelves without even handing out any preview cards.

If you have a v3 3000 already and essentially want to upgrade for Unreal engine/glide based games, why bother? Aren't all Glide games 16bit anyways? The benchmarks show the 4500 neck-and-neck with the 3000.

 

[Deeko]

On my 5500, glide looks MUCH better than 16-bit direct3d. In fact, it looks just as good as 32-bit Direct3D. It's biggest advantages over the V3 are in features, not speed. It has 32-bit which V3 doesn't have, FXTC, DXCT, 2x FSAA, AGP4x, and so forth. And it is a little faster....not a whole lot though.

 

[BFG10K]

The V4 performs at around the same level as a TNT2 Ultra. The problem with this is the TNT2 Ultra is 1 to 1.5 years old while the V4 is brand new.

Almost every single Anandtech video card benchmark has the V4 in it too. Here is a link to the GF2 MX review, which also has the V4 4500 in the graphs. As you can see, the GF2 MX outperforms the V4 plus it is cheaper and has more features. When it runs T&L games and texture heavy games the GF2 MX will outperform the V4 by even more due to its T&L and true AGP implementation.

Basically the V4 is what the V3 should have been

 

[BFG10K]

It has ... AGP4x

No Deeko, no 3dfx product has anything more than AGP * 1 because they don't have AGP texturing or AGP fast writes. AGP Voodoo boards are essentially just sitting in overclocked PCI slots.