X-bit labs

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra (NV35) Review

Category: Video

by Tim Tscheblockov

[ 05/12/2003 | 07:04 AM ]

We reviewed the new graphics solution from NVIDIA aka NV35. This long awaited product boasts a lot of really strong features and comes to replace a not very successful NV30. Now the indisputable leadership in the graphics industry solely belongs to NVIDIA. Find out more about the newcomer in our review!

Table of contents:

• Closer Look: NV35 Features and Peculiarities
  
• Closer Look: NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra Graphics Card
  
• Drivers
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Pixel Pipelines: Fillrate, Pixel Shaders
  
• Vertex Pipelines: T&L, Vertex Shaders
  
• Anisotropic Filtering
  
• Full-Screen Anti-Aliasing
  
• Gaming Benchmarks: Quake3 Arena
  
• Gaming Benchmarks: Serious Sam: The Second Encounter
  
• Gaming Benchmarks: Unreal Tournament 2003
  
• Gaming Benchmarks: Codecreatures Benchmark Pro
  
• 3DMark2001 SE Gaming Tests
  
• Game 1: Car Chase
  
• Game 2: Dragothic
  
• Game 3: Lobby
  
• Game 4: Nature
  
• 3DMark03 Gaming Tests
  
• Game Test 1: Wings of Fury
  
• Game Test 2: Battle of Proxycon
  
• Game Test 3: Troll’s Lair
  
• Game Test 4: Mother Nature
  
• Overclocking
  
• Conclusion
  

Although over half a year has already passed since the announcement of NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800/5800 Ultra, the first graphics cards based on these chips started selling only a few months ago.

The graphics cards based on NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra helped the company to regain the title of the performance leader, but still didn’t become very popular. There were several reasons for that: first of all, they were very expensive compared to ATI RADEON 9700 Pro based graphics cards, and secondly, they featured a number of serious drawbacks: high heat dissipation of the graphics core as well as of the graphics memory chips, absolutely unbearable noise, severe requirements for the computer PSU...

The launching of the new ATI VPU aka RADEON 9800 Pro (R350), has even aggravated the situation for NVIDIA in the performance graphics cards sector. The company’s competitor looks much more attractive than NV30 from any viewpoint: performance, quality, price, noise, heat dissipation, etc. And if performance is just a question of time for NVIDIA, that means how fats they manage to optimize their drivers, then all other drawbacks of the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra (see our NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra Review for more details) cannot be eliminated by any driver optimization. These particular drawbacks of the NV30 solution probably pushed NVIDIA to speed up the launching of their next graphics chip generation aka NV35.

So, today NVIDIA announces the next generation of its graphics processors. NV35 chips officially called NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900/5900 Ultra should replace NV30 in the performance graphics cards sector.

In our today’s article we will take a look at four graphics cards based on the latest ATI and NVIDIA chips: RADEON 9700 Pro (R300), RADEON 9800 Pro (R350), NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra and of course, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra. The latter super heavyweight from NVIDIA will certainly get most our attention :)

Closer Look: NV35 Features and Peculiarities

Well, it is evident that you shouldn’t expect any revolutionary innovations to be introduced in NV35,a s NVIDIA had too little time to make any radical changes to the chip architecture. Besides, the mere name of the new chip indicates that the company didn’t aim at any goal like that: the new graphics processor is “just” a faster implementation of NV30 architecture, just like NV25 (GeForce4) is in fact just a faster version of NV20 (GeForce3).

So, what does the new NV35 look like?

At first please take a look at a features table we composed for NV35 and NV30: