By Sam Parker
Published: 5/28/2003
 
The heated race between ATI and Nvidia to release the fastest graphics card is entering a new stage with the approach of the 256MB DirectX 9 cards. ATI has been able to maintain a surprisingly solid lead in the high end of the market since it released the Radeon 9700 Pro late last year, a development that's due in part to Nvidia's delays of the GeForce FX 5800. After ATI widened the lead with the release of the Radeon 9800 Pro in April, the industry has been waiting for Nvidia's next move. The graphics giant's solid response is the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 256MB, a $499 card expected to hit stores next month.

GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 256MB

The GeForce FX 5900 Ultra is major step beyond its troubled sibling, the 5800, which saw only limited distribution. First off, the new card addresses the significant noise problem of its predecessor with a redesigned cooling system that is appreciably quieter, making a dull whir that's indistinguishable from the other sounds a PC makes. However, the card does occupy more space inside the case than most, taking up the nearby PCI expansion slot as headroom for its cooler.

But this massive cooling system does have its advantages. Specifically, it allows for the card's high clock speeds. The core chip is clocked at 450MHz, somewhat lower than the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra's 500MHz but higher than the Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB's 380MHz. But what really matters is that the new card has 256-bit memory, which doubles the effective memory speed compared with its 128-bit predecessor. The 5900 Ultra's memory runs at 425MHz, providing 27.2GB per second of bandwidth, as compared with the 5800 Ultra's 500MHz memory and 16GB per second bandwidth rating. Most importantly, this means that Nvidia's card is no longer behind the ATI products in terms of bandwidth, as the 256MB 9800 Pro has 350MHz memory, for a maximum raw data speed of 22.2GB per second.

Those high-end specs may not seem that different from each other, but they're far ahead of what you get from the less-expensive new graphics cards destined for the mainstream market. It's the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra's raw speed that makes it stand out from the rest of Nvidia's lineup, but it also has some nifty features intended to speed up performance in upcoming games with advanced graphics engines. The CineFX 2.0 pixel shader engine is designed to double performance for some DirectX 9 special effects, particularly those that use the 128-bit floating-point color standard. The new UltraShadow feature is more specific, aimed at accelerating the new generation of games with dynamic volumetric shadows, like Doom 3. It's worth noting that developers must specifically develop games with UltraShadow in mind, and that the first batch of games that will use these features aren't scheduled for release until later this year.

Today's high-end cards are fast, but it's not easy to tell how fast they really are. The reason for this is they're designed to deal with tomorrow's games. Anyone really thinking about buying a card like the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra is likely more worried about how high-profile upcoming games, like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3, will perform than if the card will run a few notches faster in Unreal Tournament 2003. However, the fact that these games aren't yet available means that we're confined to testing these cards with games that are demanding by today's standards: Unreal Tournament 2003 and Splinter Cell. As it turns out, in these tests, the new Nvidia and ATI cards are almost neck and neck. The test results at 1024x768 are very close--too similar to determine a purchase. Running the benchmarks at the most demanding resolution, 1600x1200, does separate the contenders slightly, giving the GeForce FX 590 Ultra a lead in Unreal Tournament 2003. The Nvidia card's lead is most significant in the Antalus map's flyby test without antialiasing or anisotropic filtering on, where the difference tops out at 26 percent. But this one result doesn't give the Nvidia's latest card a definitive advantage.

There's no easy way to guess at how these cards will perform in future games. One benchmarking tool we've turned to in the past is Futuremark's 3DMark 03, the first publicly available benchmark that includes test scenes that use volumetric shadows and DirectX 9 pixel shaders. The initial 3DMark 03 test results we ran gave Nvidia's card a noticeable lead in the 1600x1200 results--up to 25 percent faster than ATI's competing card. However, Futuremark itself has accused Nvidia of programming the card's drivers to cheat in the test's fourth sequence. The 3D benchmark company has released a patch for the test that prevents current drivers from recognizing the test and adapting to it, which results in an up to 90 percent drop in the fourth test's results for the Nvidia card and a 10 percent drop for ATI's. At this point, it's impossible to say what the 3DMark 03 test results mean, if anything, for performance in games that are still in development. It may even be more telling to point to anecdotal Doom 3 performance assessments by id Software's John Carmack, who has said that the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra runs faster in his game.

The GeForce FX 5900 Ultra will be available at retail in a couple of weeks, but with a price tag of $499, it's not a card you need to consider rushing out and buying as an upgrade to replace a good DX8-generation graphics card. However, if you're buying a new high-performance PC in the next couple of months from a vendor that has the Radeon 9800 Pro and GeForce FX 5900 cards as options, then you may be forced to choose between the two. The results are simply too close to make a definite recommendation based only on benchmarks, but Nvidia's card seems to win out for reasons that go beyond the numbers.

The GeForce FX 5900 has some features that promise to make a difference in the future, and the card should also have the support of Nvidia's excellent driver software. For better or worse, Nvidia has put considerable effort into making sure that lots of game developers have Nvidia hardware in their development systems (and that these developers test Nvidia drivers first), though this is less of a concern than the Nvidia logo on game boxes might indicate. After being dazzled by the great-looking PC games at E3, it's tempting to immediately want a card like the 5900 Ultra--but the smart thing would be to wait until the likes of Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 are actually out before upgrading your PC to play them.

How we tested: All tests were run on a system based on an AMD Athlon 3000+ (Barton) processor, with 1GB of DDR400, an nForce2 motherboard, and Windows XP Professional installed. For more details, check out the CNET Labs Web site.