Wierd problem with FSAA and Voodoo 5500. Please read!

[moocat]

Is it possible for a Voodoo 5 to have FSAA broken but work fine otherwise? I can run high resolutions with great framerate in the games I play. But when I enable 2x FSAA the performance goes to hell. This is my third V5 so I'm familiar with the normal drop off in frame rate with FSAA enabled but this seems excessive. I've got an AGP V5 in my primary system so I have a pretty good idea about the performance I should be getting at various level of detail and resolutions. I've tried clean installs of three different driver sets and have the settings all on default (thought I've tried many different combinations). All I know for sure is that 2x FSAA is unplayable at any resolution in any of the games I play (driving sims primarily).

My system is running 98SE, DX8, and is setup almost identically to my primary computer. Something is certainly NOT right but I don't know enough about how FSAA is implemented to know if it's possible for just that aspect of the card to be defective.

 

[Volenti]

hmm, I havn't herd of that happening before, something that you can try to find what the problem is to use the fillrate test in 3dmark2000 (or 2001) in 2000 you should get about a 50% reduction going to 2x and around 75% in 4x compared to fastest performance, also try single chip only, it should perform similar to 2x FSAA, use 16bit to avoid memory bandwidth skewing the results.

 

[Volenti]

After re-reading your post I assume that you have 2 V5's in different systems? the first thing that I'd do would be to swap the 2 cards and test with a game, that would quickly show a hardware or system fault.

 

[vlieps]

To me it sounds like 99% problem with the sound. I had something similar and in my case it was the sound card and VIA chipset, actually, SB Live. I have noticed that SB Live on VIA mobo slows down many things. I fixed it somehow, but can not really tell how. I was playing around with soud card drivers, VIA drivers, V5 drivers and now it is OK. Just try everything, yes, and try to swap those cards that You have. That will give the answer if the card is defective.