GeForce FX Benchmarks Revealed: The “RADEON 9700 PRO” King Is Not Dead At All!

by Anton Shilov
01/29/2003 | 08:03 PM

Just four web-sites published their GeForce FX reviews today as there were just a few graphics cards for journalists in NVIDIA’s hands. It is not the first time NVIDIA cannot provide enough high-end graphics cards for media. As far as I remember the same was with the GeForce3 aka NV20 launch: just a couple of guys published their tests, then, in a number of weeks another batch of reviewers got their chance to take a look at the most feature-rich and powerful babe of the first half 2001. Two years have past since then and a lot changed: NVIDIA is not the one and only indisputable leader anymore: ATI not only launched their lucky R300 VPU almost half a year ahead of the rival, but also can offer sometimes higher performance compared to NVIDIA’s baby that comes later than it was expected. Is the code-named NV30 is God or what? Apparently, is it not a performance God.

Expecting that the GeForce FX will beat the current graphics cards times and will offer something extraordinary (you know, we should expect something amazing from a videocard that cannot reach us since August!), I was a bit disappointed by the results revealed by the journalists. I combined the most important facts about the GeForce FX performance and would like to share them with you:

• In Quake III the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra is either behind the RADEON 9700 PRO or just a bit ahead of ATI’s latest graphics card. Well, it is not bad at all, to tell you the truth, but all of you probably expected the new “Ultra” to kill the RADEON 9700 PRO what has not happened.
• In the Unreal Tournament flyby demos the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra is the leader, but the gap between the RADEON 9700 PRO and the new champ is very small and insignificant in most of the cases. Moreover, in some case the GeForce FX is beaten by the RADEON 9700.
• In Serious Sam Second Encounter NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra again cannot boast with the murder of the RADEON 9700 PRO and sometimes the latter manages to outperform the younger rival. There is a bad news for the GeForce FX: its monstrous fillrate is limited by memory bandwidth and when the graphics card is fully loaded, the superior NVIDIA’s LMAs and DDR-II SDRAMs cannot beat the superior 256-bit bus of the RADEON 9700 PRO with the ordinary DDR SDRAM memory.
• The only benchmark where the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra can spread its wings and fly, while the rival is crawling is CodeCult’s Code-creatures Benchmark. A lot of math1s, shaders, polygons and so on make the scenes extremely hard to perform in real-time. Here the GeForce FX star rises: it offers two times higher performance.
• The Aquanox game probably used to be a great test for NVIDIA GPU-based graphics cards, as it clearly shows the efficiency of the GeForce technologies beating the RADEON 9700 PRO substantially when we measure only raw speed. However, when it comes to anisotropic filtering and FSAA, both graphics cards show almost equal performance.
• Max Payne appears to be another example of how the speed of the 500MHz graphics processor can be limited by peak memory bandwidth. Even in “raw performance” tests the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra cannot show something extraordinary to us, not talking about the tests that load the graphics system with enormous amount of data.

Interesting things to learn about the GeForce FX VPU:

• NVIDIA has implemented adaptive-anisotropic filtering techniques in the GeForce FX chip. Now drivers offer “Balanced Performance” and “Aggressive Performance” options. The former matches ATI’s “Quality” setting, while the latter offers something that resembles ATI’s “Performance” option. In “Performance” mode the RADEON 9700 PRO simply kills the rival, while in quality modes there is a battle between the two.
• ATI used to offer better Anti-Aliasing in terms of quality and still does it. The GeForce FX 5800 Ultra has no chances here, at least, until the 8X mode is selected.
• Due to higher core-clock, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra can work more effectively in VillageMark compared to the GeForce4 Ti4600 and RADEON 9700 PRO.
• GeForce FX 5800 Ultra cannot beat the RADEON 9700 PRO in vertex shaders speed.
• GeForce FX 5800 Ultra does pixel shader operations faster than the main rival due to higher clock-speed.
• The GeForce FX 5800 graphics cards will be the first solutions of their kind we will hear. Forget about the 6000rpm monster on your CPU and listen to the sound of NVIDIA’s proprietary flow here. Well, I hope those vendors who prefer their customers to hear something better than the sound of NVIDIA’s flow will install something less aggressive on their products.
• This is not a bad VPU, but obviously it came too late and even with the most expensive DDR-II SDRAM it cannot beat the RADEON 9700 PRO in all cases.

All in all, the GeForce FX cannot be called a “winner” or a “loser” at this point. It is faster just a bit and it came 5 months later than the rival. That explains a lot and should make you understand that it will stay among the graphics cards to hold “a powerful” title months longer than the RADEON 9700 PRO when NVIDIA finally improves their drivers. Frankly speaking, I doubt there are going to be any huge performance increases caused by drivers, as NVIDIA was playing heck of time with the samples of the code-named NV30 product and I think they had just enough time to develop the drivers. If not, why has NVIDIA let the tests out? All in all, currently the GeForce FX cannot bring you anything special, unless you are a game developer, as I think.

In short. Expect the real full review as soon as we get the graphics card from somewhere. Until then read the following:

- Extreme Tech review
- Hexus review
- AnandTech Review
- Tom’s Hardware Review

PS. Keep in mind: King “R350” Kong is coming our way. It will be here sometimes in Spring.