Date:
Tuesday , July 15, 2003
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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BFG Technologies 5900 Ultra Review

Our first retail 5900-Ultra has arrived, and is being provided by BFGTech. We examine this video card and hopefully help you make an informed buying decision when it comes to NVIDIA’s latest and greatest.

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Unreal Tournament 2003

(Direct3D)

A full installation of Unreal Tournament 2003 with patch 2225 was used. For our tests, we're using our own UT2003 Benchmarking utility version 2.1. Resolutions of 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200 were tested in Direct3D High Quality mode in Antalus, and Inferno. Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic levels are noted where necessary.

First we will take a look at Antalus, an outdoor map with a lot of terrain.

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Right off the bat we see the BFG 5900 Ultra surpassing the 9800 Pro in Antalus. What can be seen here is that the 5900 Ultra excels in our quality settings almost across the board. Do notice the incredibly strong performance of the 9800 Pro’s 6XAA. There is a huge hit moving from 4XAA to 8XAA on the 5900 Ultra, 62%, that simply is not present with the scaling of the 9800 to 6XAA. This would seem to suggest that even while the 5900U has more raw memory bandwidth, the 9800 seems to use its lesser bandwidth more efficiently.

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At 1280x1024 the lines start to show some greater divergence. With NoAA and NoAF the 5900 Ultra takes a wider separation from the 9800 Pro. But once AA and AF are enabled the lines smack back close to each other. Again notice the very playable 6XAA of the 9800 Pro.

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Finally at 1600x1200 we see the same pattern that 1280x1024 exhibits. Clearly the BFG 5900 Ultra walks home with the trophy in this particular map in UT2K3. At least up to 4XAA, once we surpass that the 9800 Pro wins since it has better quality AA at 6X with the performance to play smooth.