Colour Depth
At last, 3dfx have added 32-bit support for the V4 and V5 range of cards. The main difference between 32-bit and 16-bit colours is that if you fire up a game like Quake 2 or Quake 3 then go near a wall or look at the sky, in 32-bit you will notice more detail and much less banding of adjacent colours that make up the end image. If you look around when you move back from a wall you may see some break-up or jaggedness around edges within the graphics but if you move up the resolution you will notice that this break-up/jaggedness is less, but it will still be present. The solution of this problem is to use a new technology which 3dfx announced for their Voodoo4/5 range of cards. This technologies main idea is to reduce the jaggedness around edges of the image without a loss in performance. So thus it would give you a better quality image in lower resolutions and of course make higher resolutions even better looking too.So, what's this new technology called? FSAA (Full Scene Anti-Aliasing). This is the main selling point in the new Voodoo 4 and 5 range of cards - they have 2x FSAA and 4x too. This lets the end user chose their desired modification to help smoothen the jaggedness in images as well as letting them monitor the performance loss that this produces. So, this means that the most efficient option can be chosen to balance performance and enhanced image quality. I thought that it would suck to be honest because the theory behind rendering the modified images would more than likely slow the gaming performance down way too much. However, after playing with the V5 5500 I could instantly tell that there is an increase in graphics quality and in gameplay too. With FSAA enabled, it softens up the jagged edges within the overall image such as tops of walls, edges of roads and so on thus making them look more refined and realistic. It also helps to blend all aspects of the graphics together to make the visual quality quite superior to what we're used to.
The main aim of the V4/V5 is to make the image quality high with the inclusion of FSAA. It can enhance old games as well as new. It is hard to decide what you prefer without being able to swap between the 2 modes of FSAA as well as turning it off altogether so you simply have to play around for a while allowing you to chose optimal settings. The balance between performance and visual quality must be met so therefore having 4x FSAA turned on is a waste of time if it slows the game down so badly that it is made unplayable. This is why choosing the moderation of FSAA is commendable allowing you to 'fine tune' your desired settings. All this is a reason why I love my job - I get to play with all of the latest video cards to find the fastest and nicest looking combination and pick the one I want for my system