John Gillooly previews NVIDIA's latest salvo in the graphics war.
We searched hard amongst the flurry of paper coming out of the big graphics companies during October, but there was not a production card in sight. Both NVIDIA and ATI launched refreshed models of cards as part of the pre-Christmas rush, but continued with the trend of cards being impossible to find outside of the North American continent.
While the efforts of Australia IT to rush a Powercolor RADEON 9800XT to us were scuppered at the last minute by sluggish couriers, we have managed to obtain NVIDIA's two new reference cards, the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and 5700 Ultra. Because these are reference designs and not production models consider this to be a preview rather than the review, which will come next month.
Formerly codenamed NV38, the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra replaces the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra as NVIDIA's highest performing GPU. Its core runs at 475MHz and the card uses 256MB of 256-bit DDR running at an effective 950MHz. This card sits squarely in the minor refresh category as it is still based upon the NV35 Architecture.
On the other hand the GeForce FX 5700 is a little more exciting. Targeted at the mid-range, this GPU uses a new architecture and is the first NVIDIA chip to come out of IBM's East Fishkill fabrication plant. What is even more special is that the first silicon from the plant has gone straight into production, without the minor tweaks and revisions seen in the past with chips coming from TSMC.
The mid-range is rapidly becoming the big battleground between graphics vendors, and the GeForce FX 5700 is a hefty weapon on paper. It has a core clock of 475MHz and uses 128MB of 128-bit DDR2 memory running at an effective 900MHz. Despite the high core clock, the use of Low K Dielectrics in the fabrication of the GPU means that it only needs a single height heatsink for cooling.
We tested the cards against the commercially available offerings from ATI at the time, the RADEON 9800 PRO and RADEON 9600 PRO. Next month we will compare the production GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and 5700 Ultra against ATI's XT series.
We tested using an Athlon 64 3200+ with a VIA K8T800 based motherboard and 512MB DDR RAM. The NVIDIA cards were tested with the ForceWare 52.16 drivers and the ATI cards used CATALYST version 3.8.
Our first test is the DirectX 8.0 based Codecreatures benchmark. In it the GeForce FX 5950 and the 5700 beat out the equivalent ATI cards by a fair margin.
This trend was not to continue for the 5950 Ultra, as its scores in 3DMark2001SE and Aquamark show. It only beat the RADEON 9800 PRO by an almost insignificant three per cent in Aquamark, while the 3DMark2001SE results differed by only one per cent at 1,280 x 1,024 and three per cent at 1,600 x 1,200.
However the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra fared much better against the RADEON 9600 PRO, coming in as the winner by 12 per cent in Aquamark 3. In the older 3DMark2001SE the margin is even more dramatic, with the 5700 Ultra 30 per cent faster at 1,280 x 1,024 and a whopping 40 per cent quicker at 1,600 x 1,200.
While we are yet to test a RADEON 9600XT, the fact that it is only a faster variant of the existing cards means that we are doubtful it will be able close the performance gap by much. It looks like NVIDIA has done well by focusing on the 5700 Ultra, and it has certainly become the tastiest offering we have seen in the mid-range of the market since the GeForce4 Ti4200.
Next month we will compare the performance of production GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and 5700 Ultra cards against ATI's XT cards using our new benchmarks. For now NVIDIA may still be struggling to usurp ATI as the performance king, but it has delivered a rocket into the mid range of the market and shown that it is still a definite contender in the desktop 3D stakes.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012