I know that the Voodoo 5500 is 'supposed' to have 64MB RAM, but 3DMark2001SE shows this: -

Description:            Primary Display Driver
Manufacturer:            NuAngel's Helping Hand
Name:                  NuAngel.net Voodoo5 5500 AGP
Total Local Video Memory:      32 MB <--- weird alert!
Total Local Texture Memory:      27 MB
Total AGP Memory:            0  bytes
Display Driver:            3dfx16vs.drv
Display Driver Version:      4.13.01.0028
Driver WHQL Certified:      No
Max Texture Width :      2048
Max Texture Height:      2048
Max User Clipping Planes:      6
Max Active Hardware Lights:      0
Max Texture Blending Stages:      2
Textures In Single Pass:      2
Vertex Shader Version:      N/A
Pixel Shader Version:      N/A
Max Vertex Blend Matrices:      0
Max Texture Coordinates:      2
Vendor ID:            0x121a
Device ID:            0x0009
Sub-System ID:            0x0002121a
Revision:                  0x01

I tested two different cards and BOTH V5500's said the same!

Is this normal and if not what can be done about it?

I think this is driver-related. At least on my Voodoo², where the 12mb are divided on 4mb each TMU and 4mb the FBI, dxdiag shows the full 12mb. Of course there are limitations as the fbi is for framebuffer and z-buffer only and so there is never more the 8mb texture memory also with low resolutions and only double-buffering (instead of triple). I don't think 3dmark (i only have 99max and 2000) will give comparable results in the theoretic benchmarks on voodoo2 or voodoo5 cards compared to non-3dfxcards because of the exclusive tmu's (vsa's) and their (local) memory. I suggest the exclusive memory is the reason why the 8mb texture rendering test is so slow on my Voodoo² (much slower than the 32MB texture rendering speed on my ATI RAGE PRO 4MB(!) AGP(!) although the Voodoo² beats the ATI in the RACE and FPS practical bench by nearly factor 2). Maybe there is a texture that does not fit fully in the first tmu and has to use the second and so the driver ends up have two textures constantly beeing swapped in and out. I also think that the drivers don't allow full usage because they have a kind of pipe where they profile how often each texture is used and reserve some memory for those textures. All this logic prevents theoretical benchmarks from beeing competitive. Of course i can only speak for my Voodoo² so i can't say say how good the two VSA's scale on a Voodoo5. But it would be interesting to know if the effects are the same.

The great speed of the 32mb texture rendering bench on my ATI (build 1997) pushes a question to my mind. Why didn't 3dfx fully supported the AGP specs?

Regards,
Andreas

I have read in an article about 3dfx (i surfed through your great links section falconfly) that one of the reasons for the failure of 3dfx were bad reviews in the press concerning the lack of AGP-Texturing.

Later it was the lack of the 32bit mode of the Voodoo³ that was also hyped by the press, or was it NVIDIA?

But talking about AGP texturing. I love to play Grand Prix Legends and downloaded all additional real tracks for that game. Many tracks are very detailed and texture rich. For example if i drive the Sachsenring i have 28fps in the forest and 4fps in the city on Voodoo²-Glide. On ATI-D3D i have 18fps in forest and 10 in the city.

So AGP-Texturing does only makes sense if there are many textures. But because 'number of polygons' and 'texturememory' mostly raise synchronous with the new technologies it can't help a video card last much longer than without. And do those new games really fill the 128MB's of the Radeon's and Geforce's?

Regards,
Andreas

I own a voodoo 5 5500 agp 64mb!
i have installed win98se with voodoolizer 1.05.00 winth dx8.1 support and in the dxdiag shows the memory of vga is 32mb!After uninstalling win98se I' ve installed win2000pro with voodoolizer 1.05.00 final with dx9 support!Even with the default dx of win2000 the dxdiag shown the real memory of voodoo5(64MB)!But win2000 do not support many games!Many crashes even with wwf raw and archangel demos!I want to play all my games with 64MB in win98se or win2000pro!What can i do!Is there someone who can really help me??    !Please make it fast!Thanks!

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This is what I found when digging through my collection/horde of 3Dfx stuff -- the official 3Dfx answer:
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DirectX Diagnostics (dxdiag.exe) is incorrectly reporting the amount of memory on my Voodoo5.

This is completely normal. DXDiag does not recognize the architecture of the Voodoo5 5500 properly, since the card has a dual bus design and segmented memory for each chip. DXDiag also does not properly recognize the memory reserved for frame buffer, texture storage, etc.  

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There are always problems to implement DX8.0 fully for Direct3D. Not to mention soon there will be neccessary to move to DirectX 8.1 full suport (DDraw+Direct3D). And DX8.1 means vertex/pixel shaders... lots of problems...

Nope, and for one reason -- Nvidia owns the rights to that technology, once they bought it out, if you were one of those companies wanting to continue the work of 3Dfx you were sh** outta luck! and still are.

There were several reasons Nvidia bought them out, one was -- so they don't come back!  

Meaning, Quantum could try but they would ending up paying roalties up the ying-yang, and wasting their money in the long run.

Speaking of DirectX -- last I knew of the Voodoo 4/5 cards were DirectX 6 *compliant* but for 7,8,9 if the card (any card) isn't fully compliant in haredware, you can only make it compatible, meaning it won't make use of the new funtions, but it will work --- just might be a little slower. Depending on the game.

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