Nvidia has earned its reputation for producing the fastest 3D graphics technology around by setting a brutal pace, traditionally releasing new products every six or nine months. In an industry where development costs are so high, and products are often judged on the basis of unforgiving performance tests, timing is everything. Nvidia hasn't been as lucky this time around. Early in the GeForce FX's development process, the company's chip designers bet on a cutting-edge technology, the dense .13-micron manufacturing process, that would let them produce a chip that's twice as complex and twice as fast as last year's GeForce 4. But manufacturing delays plagued the GeForce FX, and instead of coming out last fall as was originally planned, final graphics cards are now planned to hit shelves in late February or early March.

The GeForce FX has lots of potential. The specs released at the product's unveiling last November were quite impressive, and it has next-generation features that go beyond even the basic requirements for full DirectX 9 support. But the fact is that while the best-looking games for 2003 may use DirectX 9's basic features--mostly because DX9 comes with some stuff that make it easier to develop for--full support for brand-new features is a ways off.

The huge cooler is what makes the 5800 Ultra's high speeds possible.

Performance in current games is what makes or breaks any high-end graphics card, and the GeForce FX has its work cut out for it in facing the current champ, ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro. The fastest of Nvidia's new cards, officially called the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, is clocked to incredible speeds: 500MHz for the core chip and 500MHz (1GHz effective) for the DDR2 memory. But we've had an early opportunity to test the card, and while it's a huge step up from the GeForce4 Ti 4600, it doesn't seem to offer any substantial performance increase over the Radeon 9700 in current games.

Nvidia and ATI took slightly different approaches to getting lots of performance out of their high-end cards. Nvidia has stepped up to a new generation of memory, DDR2, that's capable of much higher speeds (200MHz or more above regular DDR), but at the cost of increased power usage and some additional latency. ATI's Radeon 9700 and Radeon 9700 Pro cards have double-wide 256-bit pathways between the chip and the local memory, so even with the memory at just 310MHz, the Radeon 9700 Pro offers somewhat more raw bandwidth than the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. Both Nvidia and ATI have data compression technologies built into their chips to get the most out of the available memory bandwidth, and memory speed doesn't seem to be the hard bottleneck it was in previous generations.

A direct result of the GeForce FX's high clock speeds is that the chip and memory both run very hot, and the card consumes more power than the standard AGP bus can provide. Like 3dfx's Voodoo5 5500 and ATI's recent Radeon cards, the GeForce FX cards must be connected directly to a PC's power supply by means of a standard four-pin hard drive power cable. If the cable is disconnected, the Nvidia drivers will automatically throttle the card to much lower speeds in order to maintain system stability and pop up a window with a warning message, so the power requirements don't cause any inconvenience other than requiring that a PC have an extra-beefy power supply.

Nvidia is working with a number of developers to optimize games--such as Planetside, pictured here--with advanced shader effects.

Dissipating all the heat the GeForce FX produces has required a less inconspicuous solution. As you can see in photos of the card, there's an extremely large cooling device that covers the top of the chip and the memory, as well as a low-profile copper heat sink on the other side to cool the memory on the back of the card. The cooler combines a few cooling methods, including water-filled copper heat pipes that draw heat from the memory chips on the top of the board to the main copper heat fins. Not only does this large cooler take up an additional PCI slot inside the PC's case, but it also generates quite a bit of noise. The fan cycles between two speeds, a mode for regular 2D desktop use and one for 3D applications. At the higher speed, the fan emits a high-pitched whine that's much louder than practically any CPU cooler.

Fortunately, the extra heat precautions are only absolutely critical for the high-end GeForce FX 5800 Ultra card. Nvidia has also announced a couple of workstation cards and a gaming variation called the GeForce FX 5800, which feature lower clock speeds that may allow for less radical cooling. While Nvidia said that the Quadro FX 1000 is likely to ship as a standard-size card that takes up only one slot, there currently aren't plans for consumer-level cards that fit into smaller cases, although that doesn't rule out the possibility that one of Nvidia's board partners might find a way to make one. The 5800 Ultra is still expected to cost $399, and the regular 5800 flavor will cost somewhat less.