However, we’ve now finally had a play with the faster GeForce FX Ultra -- but can it be NVIDIA’s photon torpedo to take down the RADEON 9700 PRO Death Star?
Poor NVIDIA. It must be hard to be on top for so long, only to have your dominance wrenched away like a sticky lollypop from a spoilt brat. And judging by NVIDIA’s pedantic reaction to Mad Onion’s 3DMark2003, in which the GeForce FX series performs badly, NVIDIA is indeed acting like a spoilt brat. In issue 27 of Atomic we took a look at the GeForce FX, and ended up walking away feeling rather disappointed. However, we’ve now finally had a play with the faster GeForce FX Ultra -- but can it be NVIDIA’s photon torpedo to take down the RADEON 9700 PRO Death Star?
At the time of writing, we verified with a major graphics card manufacturer that NVIDIA was producing a meagre 60 GeForce FX ultra cards EACH WEEK. Now if that doesn’t indicate that NVIDIA is having problems with its manufacturing process, nothing will. This is why it has taken so darn long for us to get our hands on the GeForce FX Ultra, and it makes the possibility of Joe Consumer getting one about as likely as reaching orbit via bodily emissions after eating a powerful curry.
The only difference between this card and the plain-Jane GeForce FX is the speed of the core and memory. The GeForce FX runs at a synchronous memory/core speed of 400MHz, while the Ultra cranks this up a notch to run synchronously at 500MHz. For those of you who dropped out of school in year six, and now reside on a doorstep drinking out of a brown paper bag, that’s a meaty 25% increase in speed.
Last month we tested the GeForce FX on an uber 3.06GHz P4 with hyper-threading, paired up with a whopping 1GHz of DDR-RAM. This time around we thought we’d go for a more realistic platform, so we used the Athlon XP 1800+ on a VIA KT400 motherboard with 512MB of DDR-RAM. And the results were even more disappointing than anticipated.
The first cab off the benchmark rank was ye olde faithful 3DMark2001, which is the Mad Onion test NVIDIA isn’t crying about. This is surprising, because the GeForce FX Ultra doesn’t do too well in this test either. At 1,024 x 768 and 1,280 x 1,024 resolutions the RADEON 9700 PRO outpaced the GeForce FX Ultra by an average of around 7%. Hmmm, things are already starting to look bad for a card that costs almost twice as much as the RADEON.
Next up was 3DMark2003. While Mad Onion requests that this benchmark is performed using publicly available drivers, we felt sorry for NVIDIA, so we used its recommended beta 43.00 drivers. We also tested with the publicly available 41.09 drivers, and only noticed a performance decrease of a couple of percent.
If you thought the Ultra performed poorly in the 2001 benchmark, its 2003 results rival that of a legless beggar dragging itself around on a little trolley. Once again it lost at both resolutions, but this time it was more of a total and utter thrashing than a small loss. We’re talking approximately 30% slower. Now that’s gotta hurt -- it’s no wonder NVIDIA is trying its hardest to discredit this benchmark (regardless of the fact that it was consulted over the vast majority of its development and only dropped out in the final stages, probably around the same time it realised the GeForce FX wasn’t going to do too well).
The Ultra managed to perform a little better in Code Creatures, one of the most demanding DX8 benchmarks currently available, but it wasn’t by the largest of margins. This time around the Ultra had the lead by around three to four percent, which is acceptable but not exactly mind blowing.
The final test focused on Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering performance. For this test AA was set to 4x and AF was set to 8x, both in the best quality mode offered by each card. Both cards were neck and neck in this test, which is probably the most pleasing result of all of the benchmarks, as the RADEON 9700 PRO is renowned for having excellent AA and AF performance. It’s great to see that the NVIDIA offering can keep up in this mode, as this is the mode that most gamers are probably going to use.
One of the biggest complaints of the GeForce FX series is the howler of a cooler, but the final production series was supposed to introduce a slightly quieter version. Well, it is slightly quieter, but still manages to give the Delta fan a good run for its money. In other words, it’s still bloody loud.
When it came to overclocking, we weren’t expecting much of this extremely hot video card (why else would it have such a massive cooling system?). We managed to squeeze an extra XXMHz out of the core, while the memory peaked at XXXMHz, an increase of XXMHz. Not bad, but certainly not enough to make this a contender to the RADEON 9700 PRO.
This card might have been brilliant, if it had been released six months ago; unfortunately it now has to compete against a card that is in most cases faster and approximately half the price. NVIDIA has definitely lost this round to ATI, but keep a close eye on the architecture used in this video card, as we’re sure NVIDIA will manage to one day give us the performance it has promised with this design.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012