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

HSR 1: Conservative Tiling

The HSR setting of 1, called Conservative Tiling in the dropdown menu, is the most orthodox of the HSR settings. After setting both the Voodoo4 4500 and the Voodoo5 5500 to use this mode of hidden surface removal, we came up with the following results.

At an HSR setting of 1 (conservative tiling), both the Voodoo4 4500 and the Voodoo5 5500 produced no rendering problems. Although this is good, the performance increase paired with the HSR setting of 1 is relatively small. In the Voodoo5 5500, the HSR 1 setting did not improve performance at all. The same setting in the Voodoo4 4500 increased performance by 1.5 FPS, an increase of a mere 2%.

At 1024x768x32 the HSR setting of 1 increases performance to a large extent but also produced rendering problems. As noted previously, the single * next to the Voodoo5 5500's score means that the gameplay produced see through surfaces at times, producing some image quality problems. Although the image quality suffered, the FPS rating increased by 8%. In the case of the Voodoo4 4500, gameplay was affected more adversely, with the game becoming somewhat jumpy and misrendered polygons popping up more often. The setting here resulted in a 30% speed increase but left gameplay very undesirable.

At 1600x1200x32, the speed of both cards increased significantly but Quake III Arena became virtually unplayable. The speed increases shown demonstrate the potential of HSR, but the immature nature of this function in driver release 1.04.01 cause sever image problems.

Perhaps the most exciting result of our HSR 1 tests is the large increase in performance noted with FSAA 2x enabled. Although at 1024x768x32 we noted some image quality problems, the speed still increased by 25%. At 800x600x32 with an HSR setting of 1, we noticed no image quality problems and saw speed increase by a full 13%. Not too bad for a simple driver tweak.