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

HSR 4: Aggressive Tiling

The final and most aggressive HSR setting is HSR 4, named "Aggressive Tiling." Let's see what happens when HSR is turned up to the max.

Once again, we only see an improvement on the Voodoo4 4500 side at 640x480x32. This time the performance of the card increases by 11% with no image quality problems.

At 1024x768x32, no card escapes without image quality problems. The Voodoo5 5500 suffers less than the Voodoo4 4500, but both cards will produce undesirable results with an HSR setting of 4 at 1024x768x32. Here you can see that the Voodoo4 4500 actually clocked in faster than the Voodoo5 5500, but the image quality of the Voodoo4 4500 was severely impaired.

At the final resolution of 1600x1200x32, both the Voodoo5 5500 as well as the Voodoo4 4500 provided very exciting scores but as a result made Quake III look absolute horrible.

As we saw with the HSR setting of 3, an HSR setting of 4 only produces acceptable gameplay at 640x480x32 with FSAA 2x. At this resolution the performance of the Voodoo5 5500 increased 10%. All other resolutions produced image quality problems.