NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. This is a flagman of the NVIDIA series targeted for the mainstream market. The use of GDDR3 memory doesn’t provide any advantages to the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra solution compared with the regular DDR-II, but can theoretically affect the price point. GeForce FX 5700 Ultra based graphics cards cost about the same as RADEON 9600 XT based ones. Although they lose to the latter in advanced games, they can compete with the RADEON 9600 XT pretty successfully in all other applications and games, especially with enabled full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. The most dangerous competitors for NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra are GeForce FX 5900 XT based graphics cards, which are just a little bit more expensive but considerably faster at the same time.

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700. It differs from the Ultra version by lower working frequencies of the GPU and graphics memory. You will not be able to reach the working frequency of the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra memory even if you overclock your card, because the 5700 is equipped with a much slower and cheaper memory chip. But you will anyway be able to get the GPU close to 475MHz clock. The overclocked GeForce FX 5700 was just a tiny bit slower than GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, and it could be a great argument in favor of these graphics cards, actually, if it were not for such powerful competitors as RADEON 9600 PRO and GeForce FX 5700 LE.

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 LE. This is an even slower solution differing from GeForce FX 5700 by much lower GPU frequency and slightly lower graphics memory frequency. Due to low nominal frequencies, GeForce FX 5700 LE demonstrates outstanding overclocking potential: the GPU frequency almost doubled as a result of overclocking. Unfortunately, I do not have any statistics at hand about the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 LE overclocking, but everything indicates that these cards will have excellent overclockability. For instance, the card, which took part in our today’s review after overclocking appeared just a little bit slower than NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra.

Keeping in mind low cost of GeForce FX 5700 LE based graphics cards and their theoretically (unfortunately, there is no statistics yet) high overclocking potential, we would recommend these cards as an excellent choice in the appropriate price category.

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600. This previous generation graphics chip yields a lot in performance to NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700/RADEON 9600 and runs as fast or slightly faster than NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 LE. Since there are competitors like faster RADEON 9600 solutions or potentially highly overclockable GeForce FX 5700 LE, there is hardly anything positive we could say about FX 5600 today.

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 XT. This is a modification of the just mentioned GeForce FX 5600 with a lower GPU frequency and 64bit memory bus. The performance of this solution is very often even slower than that of GeForce FX 5200, not to mention RADEON 9600 SE. This solution is priced as high or even higher than RADEON 9600 SE and GeForce FX 5200, that is why I wouldn’t consider GeForce FX 5600 XT a good choice today.

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200. This graphics processor is intended for the value DirectX9 compatible graphics cards. It almost always outpaces GeForce FX 5600 XT, which makes it even more attractive, bearing in mind the price, especially when we are talking about products from the “much less than $100” price range. The No.1 competitor of this solution is RADEON 9600 SE: the cards based on this chip are a little bit more expensive, but usually run much faster than the 5200.

Well, I have just expressed my opinion about the mainstream graphics solutions available in the today’s market. But it doesn’t at all mean that it is the only acceptable point of view. You have the benchmarks results in front of you. Evaluate, compare, draw your own conclusions.

I would only like to say that I didn’t express my opinion about ATI RADEON 9200 and NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti4200-8x on purpose. You see everything in the diagrams and no comment is actually necessary. You are lucky if you have a GeForce 4 Ti4200-8x and it managed to last you until spring 2004. It means you will be able to wait until fall 2004 when NV40 and R420 based solutions for the mainstream market appear.