Conclusion

So, what are our impressions about the new creation of NVIDIA?

The main feature of NVIDIA GeForce FX is the highest level of flexibility and programmability going beyond the basic requirements of DirectX 9 and surpassing the capabilities of ATI RADEON 9700 PRO. The era of “cinematic graphics” has not yet come with the arrival of GeForce FX, but looms at the horizon.

We may seem skeptical, but justifiably so: we are not at all sure DirectX 9 is going to come into our computers soon. While we are still looking for beautiful water created with DirectX 8 pixel shaders and waiting to see games that would really use the possibilities of DirectX 8 at full, not just for demo purposes, a new revolution takes place: DirectX 9 comes out. We are astonished at the new graphics level achieved in demo programs. But when will we see such graphics in real games? In half a year? In a year? We can’t tell you now.

The only positive thing is that Microsoft seems to understand how far the developers are from the ordinary user and is actively promoting a high-level programming language intended to simplify and speed up the process of writing applications using shaders. It is called High Level Shader Language (HLSL). NVIDIA and ATI, of course, are supporting this initiative as actively they can.

But back to NVIDIA and its babe.

Our test session showed that the flexible architecture and programmability of NVIDIA GeForce FX resulted in reduced performance. In some cases, the performance dropped down quite considerably.

The weakest point of the new GPU is the lack of computational power of its ALUs that are responsible for pixel shaders execution. DirectX 9 pixel shaders that use floating-point calculations are the hardest nut for GeForce FX: in this area ATI RADEON 9700 PRO leaves the newcomer not a single chance.

But this is the only evident drawback of NVIDIA GeForce FX. And why should we care about slow execution of those pixel shaders on GeForce FX? By the time computer games use them, there will be NVIDIA GeForce FX II or even III already. In any other respect GeForce FX is a worthy product, not yielding to ATI RADEON 9700 PRO in most gaming tests.

I would like to specifically single out the introduction of “fast” anisotropic filtering. The algorithm of anisotropic filtering from NVIDIA didn’t practically change, but the replacement of tri-linear filtering with the mixture of bi- and tri-linear filtering allowed losing less performance. In other words, this covered up the traditional weak spot of GPUs from NVIDIA. The user can now choose between speed and quality. Moreover, we should acknowledge that the quality tradeoff is small even in the fast mode.

The introduction of frame-buffer compression helps to increase performance when working with full-screen anti-aliasing. As a result, NVIDIA GeForce FX suffers a much lower performance drop from FSAA than GeForce4. But the new NVIDIA’s card doesn’t always look winning against ATI RADEON 9700 PRO: with FSAA, the graphics memory bandwidth affects the overall card’s performance. GeForce FX 5800 Ultra has a twice as narrow bus and thus a little lower bandwidth, although its memory works at sky-high frequency.

The new FSAA modes, 6xS and 8xS, must be the answer to ATI’s SMOOTHVISION 2.0 that uses up to 6 samples. But these new methods are only available in Direct3D and lead to a big slow-down because they also involve supersampling. So, they have a narrow scope of application: Direct3D games that don’t require much from the graphics card’s speed. In all other respects, the anti-aliasing from NVIDIA is the same as we saw in previous chips.

But how did NVIDIA actually profit from the launch of GeForce FX?

First, NVIDIA has successfully gone over to 0.13micron manufacturing technology, which has required much time and effort. Now the company can steadily go on developing, while ATI has to do the transition yet.

Second, by releasing NV30 and GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, the company at last offered an answer to ATI’s RADEON 9700 PRO.

Third, the innovations from NV30 were used in NV31 and NV34. These are simpler, better value and mass (read: “money-making”) DirectX 9-compatible chips.

I believe that NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra based graphics cards will hardly become really mass products. Yes, the solution we tested appeared very fast in the existing gaming applications. Besides, it supports all latest features and from the technological viewpoint looks a little more attractive than ATI RADEON 9700 PRO... But the noise produced by the monstrous cooling system makes all these advantages fade away, as well as the price of this product. The graphics cards based on NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra appeared so high, that ATI RADEON 9700 PRO still remained an unbeaten leader in the high-performance graphics cards sector from the price-to-performance point of view.

Well, let's wait and see how the things will go. Very soon we can expect the new NV35 and ATI R350, andf it means that the picture in the today's graphics market may easily change...