Our de facto standard for OpenGL benchmarking once again officiates the battle between the most powerful video cards on the market. As always, we've tested under Normal, High Quality, and MAX settings in order to stress 16-bit, 32-bit, and geometric rendering capabilities. For our Normal Quality testing, the desktop resolution was set to 16-bit, and of course, v-sync was disabled in all of our testing. Also, keep in mind that we test Quake III with sound on as that is how the benchmark was actually designed to be run.
I'd also like to mention that we've tried various methods of installing the drivers to enhance performance, as mentioned on the 3dfxgamers.com message boards. These techniques have no impact if you correctly install the card upon installation. If at all possible, stick to 3dfx's install utility.
Testing under Quake III's Normal Quality settings, the Voodoo5 performs similarly to the Rage Fury MAXX at low resolution and places between the GeForce and GeForce2 at higher resolutions. We wouldn't expect the card to best the GeForce2 here due to its lower theoretical fill rate. In addition, bandwidth utilization is at a minimum so the card with the highest fillrate comes away with the victory.