Drivers

We used version 42.68 driver for our NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra tests. After installation, the graphics card settings window can be found in a separate page of the Display Properties window.

Most of the driver panels are standard and thus not very interesting. But some of them contain settings peculiar to NVIDIA GeForce FX.

First of all, we can adjust the frequencies of the card:

You can independently set up the GPU and graphics memory frequencies for 2D and 3D modes. By default, they are 300MHz/600MHz for the 2D mode and 500MHz/1000MHz for 3D applications.

Another interesting page contains options to set the card up for 3D applications:

Here you can choose one of the three modes setting the “performance-to-quality” ratio: Application, Balanced and Aggressive. We will discuss each mode in detail later in this article. Here you can also force full-screen anti-aliasing (2x, Quincunx, 4x and modes available in Direct3D only: 4xS, 6xS and 8xS) and anisotropic filtering (2x, 4x, 8x).

Testbed and Methods

We used the following testbed for our test session:

• Intel Pentium 4 2800MHz CPU;
• ASUS P4S8X (SiS648) mainboard;
• 512MB DDR400 SDRAM;
• IBM DTLA 305030 30GB HDD.

The software set included:

• Microsoft Windows XP Professional;
• Microsoft DirectX 9.0;
• SiS AGP v. 114 driver;
• Detonator 42.68 for NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra and GeForce4 Ti4800;
• Catalyst 3.1 for ATI RADEON 9700 PRO.

We used default drivers settings for synthetic benchmarks with one exception: we turned off video synchronization (VSync).

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra was tested in two modes: at its regular working frequencies (500MHz/1000MHz) and at 325MHz/620MHz. The latter are regular clock-rates of ATI RADEON 9700 PRO, thus we will be able to compare the efficiency of NV30 functional units with those of R300.

Well, let’s get started.