FSAA is designed to enhance the gaming experience by eliminating hesitation and jagged edges from moving imagery. The cards will in fact upgrade the appearance of older games as well as new ones. And on the Macintosh side, the Voodoo5 is-for the moment, at least-one of the best options for 3D of any kind on the Mac platform, which has long lacked for powerful 3D graphics accelerators.
A game running with FSAA enabled looks stunningly clean and smooth. In most cases, FSAA does not slow down game performance, though occasionally a game may run more slowly under FSAA, in which case, the manufacturer recommends cutting back or disabling the feature.
Though the PC-based Voodoo card will run on a system as modest as a 90mhz Pentium, the recommended configuration would include a 233mhz Pentium II or higher system. The Mac version requires a G3 or G4 computer.
Both boards feature dual VSA-100 chips with scalable architecture, texture compression, and the FSAA technology. On the PC side, the Voodoo5 6000 AGP, a model with four VSA-100 chips onboard, is scheduled for shipment later this year. The company has not announced any plans to ship a four-chip version for the Macintosh.
The Voodoo5 PCI for the PC costs $299.99 and comes with 64mb of graphics memory and support for DirectX, Glide, and OpenGL. The Macintosh version costs $329.99 and comes with 64mb of graphics memory and support for all current Mac APIs, including Quickdraw, Quicktime, Rave, Glide, and Apple OpenGL. (3dfx; San Jose, CA; 408-935-4400; www.3dfx.com) -Jenny Donelan