Date:
Sunday , May 11, 2003
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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GeForceFX 5900 Ultra / Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB

One article, two new video cards. NVIDIA's GeForceFX 5900 Ultra. ATI's Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB. Head to head IQ and Performance!

Introduction

It has certainly been a long road for NVIDIA this past product cycle. Considering NVIDIA’s high-flying past of fast and feature rich cards, the result of the GeForceFX series was shocking to us all. Delays in manufacturing on the .13 micron process, delays in availability of DDR-II RAM chips, and other hold-ups made this series of cards late to the DX9 game. In wasn't long before talks of a kind of "3dfx curse" started making its way around the message boards. A couple parallels existed between the NV30 launch and 3dfx’s old Voodoo5 launch: a slower performing part compared to the competition, and one that was being released much later than it should have.

ATI has had their DX9 part out since September of 2002 along with an announcement of the R300 in July of that year. They shocked everyone by creating a card with more raw memory bandwidth than any card at the time, all thanks to their 256-bit memory bus. It nearly doubled the bandwidth of what was already established as the fastest card at the time, the Ti4600. For the next 5 months, ATI would be the only company to have a fully functional DX9 video card that not only had the features, but also the best AA/AF image quality and performance available.

On November 18, 2002, NVIDIA finally showed the world what we had been waiting a long time for. After the curtains lifted, we were introduced to the NV30, aka GeForceFX 5800. However, it wasn’t until January 27, 2003, more than two months later, that we actually had our hands on the hardware itself. We had literally only a few days worth of time to evaluate this monster before the embargo date lifted for the preview. In that hands-on preview of the GeForceFX 5800, we found that the performance numbers were very close to that of the 9700 Pro. There were a few situations where the performance numbers were faster, and a few where they were slower, but all around it seemed to be on par with the 9700 Pro. Or so we thought.

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In our GeForceFX 5600/5200 preview, we had the opportunity to take a look at the NV31 (GeForceFX 5600) and NV34 (GeForceFX 5200) video cards. These chips are based on the NV30 architecture but with reduced performance to facilitate their price point. What we found out there, in a nutshell, was that if we spent the time to make sure we were comparing Image Quality (IQ) on and "apples to apples" basis, the GeForceFX line of cards performed horribly compared to their direct competition from ATI.

Yet there were still other concerns with the 5800. One was the amount of heat the card generated. There was so much that the 5800 and 5800 Ultra with a 500MHz core and 500MHz DDR-II memory had extreme cooling measures put into place just to keep the card running at default clock speeds. The FlowFX system soon became the talk of the town and more than the butt of a few jokes.

Other questions started making their way around the net about Floating Point Precision accuracy of the NV30. When testing Pixel Shader 2.0 performance ourselves, we found the performance trailing the 9700 Pro by quite a bit.

Finally, there was the issue of availability. The 5800 cards are just hard to find. They are just now starting to show up on retail shelves. With limited availability such as this, the price has also been pretty steep compared to the competition.

NVIDIA is aware of all of this and they know they have made some mistakes. Anyone that knows NVIDIA, also knows that they are a team of true competitors that do not like to lose in any way, shape, or form. They have learned from the mistakes and have "corrected" many of those in record time.

Today ATI launches their 256MB version of the Radeon 9800 Pro and NVIDIA is kicking off their GeForceFX 5900 Ultra. We are happy to show them to you side by side and powered by one of the fastest personal computer systems on the face of the planet.