NVIDIA Ships GeForce FX 5950 Ultra GPUs

by Anton Shilov
10/29/2003 | 02:26 PM

Days after the official announcement of the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra graphics processors, add-in-card card partners of NVIDIA Corporation began to sell graphics cards powered by the mentioned GPU in Asia and the USA.

The GeForce FX 5950 Ultra code-named NV38 unveiled late last week is a follow-up for the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra architecture that improves the overall performance by using higher-clocked GPU and up to 256MB of GDDR2 SDRAM memory. All architectural innovations of the original NV35 processor are inborn by the NV38 GPU with no significant tweaks. Engine and memory clocks are said to be 475MHz and 950MHz correspondingly.

Announced together with the high-end part, the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra GPU is the first chip produced by NVIDIA in 0.13 micron at the IBM foundry in East Fishkill, New York. The core boasts with NVIDIA CineFX 2.0 engine as well as NVIDIA UltraShadow technology and has other peculiarities introduced in GeForce FX 5900-series micro-architecture. Graphics cards featuring the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra technology provide GPU and GDDR2 memory clock-speeds of 475MHz and 900MHz in that order. The 5700-series of GPUs will be targeted at mainstream and performance-mainstream markets this Fall.

The shiny new GeForce FX 5950 Ultra with 256MB of DDR SDRAM memory costs from $425 to $485 in the USA, according to X-bit labs Dealtime. The same product is available for $578 to $640 in Japan.

The GeForce FX 5700 and GeForce FX 5700 Ultra-based graphics cards were not offered for sale at press time and are expected to emerge only in November 2003. Please check here for availability updates.

Update: Readers report about GeForce FX 5700 Ultra availability in retail stores, such as BestBuy. The graphics cards cost $219 with mail-in-rebate.