NVIDIA NV35 Specifications Revealed!

by Anton Shilov
05/08/2003 | 03:12 PM

Let today will be an NVIDIA Day since later the corporation will announce its financial results, while now we have here the first real specifications of the long awaited GeForce FX 5900-series also known as NV35 GPU published by a web-site. Only on Tuesday, the 13^th of May, NVIDIA will officially uncover its new graphics processors, but fortunately we can share this information with you now.

As X-bit labs told you a couple of months ago, the NV35 aka GeForce FX 5900 GPU does not have too many differences from its predecessor, the GeForce FX 5800. As we expected, the main performance booster of the part is its 256-bit memory bus that will skyrocket speed of the graphics card compared to the previous high-end solution from NVIDIA. Probably ATI’s RADEON 9800 PRO in its current implementation will also be slower than NVIDIA’s flagship offering by up to 80%, according to NVIDIA, though, wait for our very own review to find out more exact performance figures of both products.

The GeForce FX 5900 will use 4x2 or 8x0 configuration of rendering pipelines and texture units depending on task, just like the GeForce FX 5800 GPU. For the sake of truth I should mention that NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 will still have a few new features implemented. First of all, NVIDIA claims that floating-point pixel shader speed on the new GPU will be twice as fast compared to the original GeForce FX 5800. In this case it may even be as fast as on the RADEON 9800 PRO VPU depending on the code. NVIDIA calls its new pixel shader engine as CineFX 2.0 architecture. Besides, this architecture also has an interesting technology called UltraShadow that should improve performance of shadow calculations in next-generation of computer games. In order to further improve performance and maybe quality of FSAA and anisotropic filtering, NVIDIA offers another batch of optimizations it calls as HCT. Unfortunately, there is almost no information about the new patterns now, so, wait till our very own Tim reveals everything in his article for you.

Because graphics processors are extremely complex these days, ordinary PR and marketing materials cannot provide us any really in-depth information, so, please come back next week when we may reveal something more about NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 graphics processing unit.

As always, NVIDIA will offer a number of graphics solutions based on its flagship technology. There will be three different types of graphics cards coming out from NVIDIA’s AIB partners this Summer based on the GeForce FX 5900 processor:

• GeForce FX 5900 Ultra: NVIDIA NV35 GPU clocked at 450MHz and 256MB of DDR SDRAM clocked at 850MHz and utilizing 256-bit bus. All graphics cards will be equipped with DVI-I, D-Sub and VIVO connectors. The ESP for the part is 499 Euros or Dollars, expected time of availability if June.
• GeForce FX 5900: NVIDIA NV35 GPU and 128MB of DDR SDRAM utilizing 256-bit bus. Lower GPU and memory frequencies. All graphics cards will be equipped with DVI-I, D-Sub and TV-Out connectors. The ESP for the part is 399 Euros or Dollars, expected time of availability if June.
• GeForce FX 5900 Value: NVIDIA NV35 GPU and 128MB of DDR SDRAM utilizing 256-bit bus. Lower GPU and memory clocks. All graphics cards will be equipped with DVI-I, D-Sub and TV-Out connectors. The ESP for the part is 299 Euros or Dollars, expected time of availability if June.

One more important thing about the GeForce FX 5900-series. Forget about the FlowFX.

PS. Read the original article about the NV35 in French here.