3dfx's Voodoo5 in Reviewers' Hands

The Voodoo5 card that I had hoped to buy at Macworld was the subject of no less than four reviews yesterday:

Accelerate Your Mac!,
Penstar Systems,
MacCentral and
SharkyExtreme

The consensus is that the 3dfx 5500 PCI graphics card is fabulous in visual 3D rendering, exactly as I saw and reported from Macworld. It is excellent at 2D acceleration. It has 2 video ports, a VGA and a DVI, but no new ADC port yet. 3dfx was reported to have stated that it will support the new ADC port. There's no DVD support so you'll have to keep your ATI card available if your computer has DVD capability and you use it for such. The speed of 3D games in terms of frames per second was disappointing to many reviewers. The issues seem to be the limitations of the Mac's system bus and the v1.0 drivers. The drivers will be optimized with subsequent version releases and the frames per second in the 30's -50's seem fast enough for all 3D games even if the rate is half that of a 933 MHz Pentium III. The 5500 will cost $329 and should be available in the next 1-3 weeks if the schedule mentioned at Macworld is kept.