![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Monday , January 27, 2003
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
GeForce FX 5800 Ultra Preview
They're back...finally. NVIDIA gave us the new GFFX and we run it through some benchmarks and IQ comparisons while going head to head with the ATi 9700 Pro.
Introduction:
Since late last year, we’ve been asked by NVIDIA, “Are you ready?” We answered "YES!" on November 18th, when the GeForce FX was officially launched with sketchy dates on when the boards would appear. Based on the rumors and hype surrounding this card, it is clearly one of the most anticipated hardware products in recent memory, and for months we have all waited to see if the GeForce FX can live up to the gamers' expectations.
Will the card be as fast as it’s supposed to be? Has NVIDIA raised the bar when it comes to AntiAliasing and Anisotropic Filtering? Is that new cooling system more than just a bunch of hot air?
The card we have today is an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra reference board with a clock speed of 500MHz and a memory speed of 1GHz DDR2. There has been lots of talk about NVIDIA controlling production of the first GFFX cards to hit the market, but since this is a "reference board", we are still going to label this article a PREview. We will be visiting actual retail cards when they become available to us.
Now, let’s take the GeForce FX out for a spin, and run it head to head against its main competitor, the ATI Radeon 9700 PRO. Will the FX thoroughly defeat the competition, or will it just barely keep ahead? Let’s see.
If you want to get a complete explanation about what is new with the GeForceFX and specifications you may read our GeForceFX Tech Preview which lays all of this out for you in easy to digest terms. This preview will concentrate on initial performance and IQ (Image Quality) of the GeForceFX 5800 Ultra.
The GeForceFX 5800 Ultra
Here she is in all her green neon glory. It is the exact same size in length as a Ti 4600. It sports the external Molex power connector to give it the juice it needs to run properly. The back heatsink covers the back RAM modules and the bracket on the back holds the whole unit onto the core. You are probably saying the same thing we did after seeing the intake port on it, won’t it get dusty? No air filter on the intake. Surely canned air will be the GFFX owner's friend.
The fan pulls in air from the outside of your case and blows it across the copper fins where the heat has been brought to thanks to heat pipe technology. You can see the pipes going from the plate to the fins. You can also see the memory modules sandwiched under some kind of thermal material. Of course there is a lot of thermal interface material there as it is impossible to mate the five surfaces properly without doing some custom work to each and every GFFX heatsink. We will be covering this more when retail product hits the shelves.
As we already knew, the GFFX will take up your first PCI slot (on most traditional boards) due to the heatsink and fan unit protruding far from the face of the card. You can however plug a PCI card directly in front of the GFFX without worry since it intakes its air from the outside of your case, making it "completely" closed off from the inside of your case.
Drivers:
The driver version we have working with the card right now is 42.63. These correctly detect the card as GeForceFX 5800 Ultra.
The Performance and Quality Setting tab will be the one you will be most interested in. The Performance option at the top determines the level of texture quality you will receive from this card. Performance-Balanced is closest to ATI’s Quality setting on Anisotropic. If you set the slider to Performance-Aggressive you will lose image quality and gain performance. Performance-Application lets the application decide what is best.
The Anti-Aliasing slider has options from Application Preference to Off, to 2X to Quincunx, then 4X, 4xS, 6xS and 8xS. It is important to note that 4xS, 6xS, and 8xS AA are only available in Direct3D.
The Anisotropic Filtering slider lets you select from Off, to 2X, 4X, and its max 8X.
An option that may be somewhat confusing is the "Texture Sharpening" check box. If you enable this checkbox it will set the Anisotropic Level up 1 notch. For example if you are at 2X Anisotropic Filtering and you enable Texture Sharpening it will now operate at 4X AF. If you are at 4X AF and enable Texture Sharpening it will run at 8X AF. If you are already at 8X AF then turning on Texture Sharpening will do nothing. It doesn’t have anything to do with LOD. It works if you have AA enabled or disabled. The theory behind this option was explained to us a being there for those folks that have no idea what Anisotropic Filtering is and are afraid to increase the AF slider. This way even scared n00bs get some Aniso love as everyone most likely knows that things look "better" with sharper textures.
The GeForceFX has had a lot of engineering put into the cooling system to make it less invasive. It has hardware monitoring abilities that allow it to adjust fan speed and clock speed automatically. When in a standard 2D environment it operates at 300MHz core and 300MHz (600MHz DDR) memory. This allows it to not generate as much heat and thus producing less fan noise. When a 3D application is initialized, the card adjusts the clocks to 500/500 (1000 DDR) instantaneously and at the same time the fan spins up to full speed. So the card goes from loud to louder. I did not experience any problems what-so-ever with this feature. Every app I threw at it caused the card to kick up to full speed and did not cause any lag or slow downs. It is an appreciated feature NVIDIA took the time to develop.