Performance

Quake 3 Arena

The GeForce FX 5600 Ultra is ahead of Gigabyte GV-R96P128D, which works at lower frequencies. When we amend this by overclocking, the Gigabyte wins in high resolutions.

The GV-R96P128D is most efficient at FSAA. It is running abreast of the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra. When overclocked, the RADEON leaves the GeForce behind.

We see the same picture here. It is a known fact that the anisotropic filtering algorithm implemented by ATI Technologies in its VPUs works faster than the one implemented in NVIDIA GPUs, but at the same time it provides somewhat poorer image quality.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

Higher frequencies help GeForce FX 5600 Ultra to win in higher resolutions. The overclocked RADEON 9600 is also not bad, though.

The results look very similar to what we saw in Quake 3. However, GeForce FX 5600 Ultra performs better in this game. The overclocked GV-R96P128D is beyond competition.

With anisotropic filtering enabled, the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra runs faster than RADEON 9600 Pro working at the nominal frequencies, but overclocking pushes the RADEON on top.

Note also that the new version of NVIDIA’s Detonator seems to have got rid of the problems with Return to Castle Wolfenstein. We don’t see the deplorably low results as it was in case of Detonator 44.03.