V5 5500 AGP Report with CM

[kump]

I finally replaced my Quantum SLI V2 board with the voodoo 5 5500 AGP after reading about the full screen anti-aliasing (FSAA) discussion here on this board. $299 to make even CM look better was worth it in my book, CM must have the best. My PC runs at 500MHz (not accelerated). 1025 x 768 was the resolution I stuck with.

1) I looked at FSAAx2 and FSAAx4. Incredable. The screen shots referenced earlier on this board don't quite do it justice. Vehicles look better up close and far away. Its hard to describe or show in a screen shot. You have to see it. Not having those jagged lines really does make a difference. Even the unit bases and move/target lines looked so much better. I was very impressed, and even more excited about getting my CM order, if that is even possible.

2) My V2 card had blocky smoke for high quality smoke. Not any more, the V5 handles the high quality smoke well.

3) Someone complained about the mouse pointer graphics in CM using the V5. I saw no problems with the mouse pointer, flags, etc.. Everything was looking perfect.

4) Performance in FSAAx4 was fine. No change. I did notice a slow down in a lot of smoke, which improved, but not much, in FSAAx2 and then without any anti-aliasing. But this only happened when I had a lot of smoke in the same location (smoke area fire, five + rounds). Less smoke was less noticable in slow down. This is also when you are panning the camera. Usually not the case when watching the action. I was not disturbed.

Overall, I was very happy with the purchase and only one thing left to do. Wait for that mail man...

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Garry Kump

[Lee]

Congrats on getting such a cool video card. It would take at least

an 800-900 mghz Athlon to push the card to it's limits. So you haven't

seen all it can do yet. When you upgrade your MB, your v5500 will be

ready to make use of the extra power.