So, the major remarkable feature of the new better value chips from NVIDIA is the retained functionality of the “fully-fledged” forefather, NV30. In other words, these chips comply with DirectX9 specification, support new fast anisotropic filtering method, support full multisampling providing high performance with enabled full-screen anti-aliasing.

Some of the features of the new NV31/NV34, however, are worth discussing in a bit greater detail (they are marked with comment numbers):

[1]: NV31 and NV34 chips, just like their forefather, NV30, feature very flexible architecture, which is capable of creating different number of pixel pipelines (NV30 architecture was discussed in great detail in our article called “NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra Review: New Technologies and Performance”). New NVIDIA chipsets have been simplified compared with NV30. But if the “youngest” of the two newcomers, NV34, doesn’t have anything new about the pixel pipelines, and represents a kind of “half of NV30” from this point of view, then the “elder” NV31 can boast new features. NV31 architecture allows two versions of internal organization: 2 pipelines with 2 texturing units per pipeline (this modification is also available for NV34) and 4 pipelines with 1 texturing unit per pipeline. The latter modification cannot be applied to NV34, because with 4 pixel “pipelines” (just like NV30 with 8 “pipelines”) cannot perform the texturing and write the color value into the frame buffer.

NV31 with its progressive architecture will evidently boast an advantage over NV34, because it will be able to select the most suitable internal organization for each particular case. For example, in Quake3 Arena the use of two pixel “pipelines” will be more helpful for most surfaces featuring two textures (base texture + lightmap), while all sorts of explosions or rocket tracks will be drawn more efficiently with 4 pipelines involved.

It looks as if this particular internal architecture had been initially implied for NV30, but for some reason they failed to implement it completely, and only in NV31 NVIDIA managed to put this idea fully into life.

The results comparison for NV31 and NV34 in real applications will show, how efficient is this way of building the chip architecture.

[2]: Pixel and Vertex pipelines of NV34 boast limited features compared with NV31 and NV30. Nevertheless, NV34 meets the minimal Microsoft DirectX9 requirements on the hardware level.

[3]: Unlike NV31 and NV30, NV34 doesn’t support frame buffer compression. The absence of frame buffer support in NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200/5200 Ultra may seriously affect the performance of this solution with enabled full-screen anti-aliasing.

Frame buffer compression is used during full-screen anti-aliasing by means of multisampling (you can find more details on multisampling and supersampling in our article called “On the Way to Ideal Picture: Anti-Aliasing by Contemporary Graphics Cards”). Bearing in mind that during multisampling all pixels located not on the polygon edges feature subpixels of the same color, the chips can write into the frame buffer only one color value. Unfortunately, this technique cannot be applied to pixels located on the polygon edges, because in this case each subpixel can be of a different color. However, these pixels are not very numerous, so that the overall data volume still gets considerably reduced. For instance, in case of 4x multisampling the data transferred to the frame buffer can get down to ¼ of the initial amount.

Well, it’s high time we moved over to the real products and real tests.

In this review we are going to take a closer look at the reference graphics cards from NVIDIA based on GeForce FX 5600 Ultra and GeForce FX 5200 Ultra, and one of the first mass graphics cards built on NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200. The today’s heroes will be compared with their predecessors, namely NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200-8x and MX440-8x. Also we will take a few solutions from NVIDIA’s direct rival, ATI: RADEON 9500 Pro as a competitor to NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra and RADEON 9000 Pro as a competitor to NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200/5200 Ultra.