Integrated 128-bit 3D/2D
VSA-100 processor(x2)
2-way SLI scalability
64MB SDRAM
166MHz/166MHz core/memory clock
Dual pixel pipeline
667Mpixels/s fill rate
667Mtexels/s fill rate
1X/2X/4X AGP with full sideband support
32-bit rendering
32-bit textures
2Kx2K maximum texture size support
Single-cycle trilinear mipmapping
Up to 24-bit floating point depth buffer (Z and W)
8-bit stencil buffer
3dfx FXT1 texture compression
T-buffer technology
2X and 4X full-scene hardware anti-aliasing
Depth-of-field blur
Motion blur
128-bit Windows GUI accelerator
350MHz RAMDAC
Planar-to-packed-pixel digital video format conversion (DVD Hardware assist)

The Voodoo 5 5500 features two VSA-100 chips running in SLI mode. There is 64 Meg of SDRAM with 32 Meg going to each VSA-100 chip. Each VSA-100 chip can address up to 64MB of memory.

The VSA-100 has a dual pixel pipeline, but can only do one texture per pixel so texel and pixel fill rates are exactly the same (2 chips x 166MHz clock x 2 pixels per clock). That gives us a fill rate of 667Mpixel per second. A really high number indeed. However, it's still not as high as nVidia's GeForce2 GTS which has fill rate of 800 Mpixel per second.

Because of the way 3dfx integrates the memory on the card, the memory speed can not be adjusted independent of the core speed. This may create a problem when you try to overclock the card. It's possible to get a card with a good core but not so good memory. Because core speed and memory speed has to be the same, this can limit how high you can overclock the Voodoo 5.

Unlike the GeForce2 GTS, the Voodoo 5 makes do with SDRAM, instead of much faster DDR RAM. While the use of SDRAM helps to keep the price of the card to a reasonable level, there is a performance loss to be paid. You can really see this at high resolutions.

Here's a screen shot from the 3dfx tools. The control panel allows you to view and adjust prettying much anything in the card. There is even a tab to overclock it, allowing you to increase the card speed from the stock 166 all the way to 220Mhz.

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