3dfx Voodoo4 4500AGP

Final Words

With a street price of around $150, the Voodoo4 4500 is going to be a very hard sell. As a $100 or sub-$100 card, the Voodoo4 4500 does have some justification behind it, unfortunately in many cases it is simply too little too late for 3dfx.

The Voodoo4 4500 would have been perfect around the introduction of the Voodoo3 3500TV or before NVIDIA brought the GeForce2 MX to market, however now that you can pick up a GeForce2 MX with TwinView support for around the same price, or one without the feature for a little less, the Voodoo4 4500 definitely loses its appeal.

While we criticized ATI's introduction of the Radeon SDR at the $150 price point, it definitely offers more bang for your buck than the Voodoo4 4500 does.

The problem with the Voodoo4 4500 is mainly that it's lacking in the fill rate department, and while overclocking would be able to help solve that we weren't able to push the card far enough as a 5% overclock was the highest we could achieve. It would take much more to get the Voodoo4 4500 to the point where it could compete in the fill rate department.

While 3dfx could theoretically outfit the Voodoo4 with hand picked 183MHz VSA-100 chips, it doesn't make sense for them to do that now. Their concentration should most definitely be on getting the next product out while keeping their head above water for now, it's definitely been a very bumpy ride for the company that at one point was the undisputed king of the 3D accelerator world.