Date:
Thursday , October 23, 2003
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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GeForceFX 5950 Ultra PREview

A preview of NVIDIA’s new flagship video gaming GPU. We take their reference GFFX 5950Ultra and show you performance compared to the competition in a way that we never have before. Real games, real Image Quality, real frame rates.

continued...

Drivers:

Cheating & Optimizing & DX9

"NVIDIA" and "drivers" are two things that used to go together synonymously, but throughout this year there has been much buzz about problems, unfair optimizing, and downright benchmark cheating concerning NVIDIA drivers. For the most part in the way it is viewed today, cheating and optimizations are relative. If a company degrades image quality in order to gain performance, is that cheating? Or is that an optimization? Others might argue that it is a "bad optimization". Outside of obvious instances of cheating as were exposed earlier this year, the call as to the definition of what you are seeing is really up to you.

Most think that proper driver optimizing is done to gain performance resulting in an uncompromised Image Quality output. Others think that a performance tweak that compromises the IQ in any way is a "cheat". Also there is a lot of talk about NVIDIA having to make game specific optimizations to drivers in order to get performance out of certain games, specifically with DX9 games. We know for a fact this is true. Statements have been made by game developers that games have to be coded with NVIDIA hardware in mind. We know for a fact this is true as well. For the person playing the game, this should be transparent though. The gamer should not have to care about such matters, but the fact is that this is something that needs to be taken into consideration and we will cover this more in our conclusion.

Still, no matter what your viewpoint or opinion on these matters, IQ is still IQ, and performance is still performance at the end of the day. We will evaluate both and give you our thoughts on how each impacts actual gameplay. After all, playing games is why you bought that shiny new video card.

Det 50s

Today NVIDIA is releasing a new driver set dubbed "Release 50". The driver version is 52.16 and it is WHQL certified. Our stance has been to wait and use an officially released driver when available. We are trying our best not to use drivers that will never be released to the public. Now that the 52.16 is WHQL stamped and publicly available, we can evaluate gameplay using it.

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Along with this new driver, NVIDIA is changing up their driver packaging. ForceWare is the suite of software and drivers to power NVIDIA hardware such as their nForce line of motherboard chipsets and their graphic card GPUs. The ForceWare package includes the release 5X Drivers and all the features associated with that such as Digital Vibrance Control, NVRotate, NVKeystone, and Multimedia Software.

ForceWare is to NVIDIA what Catalyst is to ATI.

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Above are screenshots of the 52.16 driver installed on the GeForceFX 5950Ultra. As you can see, the default Image Setting is set to "Quality" and Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering are set to "Application-Controlled". The 2D speed runs at 300/950 and the 3D speed is 475/950.

Trilinear Filtering

Before we dive into the games we wanted to look at something that is a growing issue that involves Trilinear Filtering.

Back in July we published an article looking at the level of filtering that NVIDIA was applying in the driver at that time. Our goal was not to pass judgment on whether this method is wrong or right. It was simply to evaluate the method of filtering to see if it negatively impacted the gameplay experience. What we found was that it did not impact the actual gameplay experience in any way in that specific situation.

However, while it didn’t negatively impact gameplay experience in that particular game that doesn’t mean it can’t in another game. The meat of the problem is the fact that NVIDIA is forcing a "not true" level of filtering upon us, not giving us the option to truly let the game decide the filtering and be seen as the game developer most likely intended.

In NVIDIA’s driver control panel there are selections labeled "Application-Controlled", which would lead you to believe that when selected would do just that and allow the application to control filtering features. However, with "Application-Controlled" selected in the control panel we cannot get "full" Trilinear filtering, even if you select the options from the game itself such as in UT2003. Whereas on the R3xx line from ATI if you leave the control panel at Application Preference you can select the filtering level from the game and it will allow the game/gamer to decide the filtering level.

In this new 52.16 driver it seems NVIDIA has gone one step further and has forced their lessened Trilinear Filtering on every Direct3D application, and the user cannot correct it.

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Above is a screenshot of a program that lets you test the filtering levels in Direct3D. It is basically a long tunnel with the mip-maps being highlighted so that you can see the amount of filtering between them. We have cut the picture in half and placed the GeForceFX 5950 Ultra part on the left side and the Radeon 9800XT part on the right side. You can clearly see where the two halves meet near the middle. You will also notice that the GFFX 5950Ultra has a harsher transition to it with more abrupt changes between mip-maps than the 9800XT does.

What this means is that at their default Application Preference settings the 9800XT is doing better Trilinear filtering than the 5950Ultra is with the 52.16 driver. This is the default setting folks, and no matter what you change the AF level to it will keep on using this level of filtering, even if you select otherwise in any D3D game.

While you think about that, do keep in mind that what really matters is what is noticeable in gameplay and whether it affects it negatively. If you aren’t going to use AF, this could have a negative impact as you will notice the mip-map levels ‘moving’ with you as you run through games. However, if you run with AF enabled this will be less noticeable. We will take a look at some screenshots in the games we use in this preview.

Some gamers have issue with NVIDIA limiting their choices, and others do not. Obviously, that is a decision for you to make for yourself.

Test Setup:

ABIT IC7-G (i875P), Intel Pentium 4 3GHz “C” operating at 800MHz FSB, 2 X 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LL TwinX Dual Channel DDR400, Maxtor 40GB ATA/133, Windows XP Professional SP1 with DirectX 9.0b.

NVIDIA GeForceFX 5950Ultra 256MB – Operating at default clock speeds 475/950 using Detonator 52.16 driver (WHQL).

NVIDIA GeForceFX 5900Ultra 256MB – Operating at default clock speeds 450/850 using Detonator 52.16 driver (WHQL).

ATI Radeon 9800XT 256MB – Operating at default clock speeds 412/730 using Catalyst Driver 3.8 (WHQL).