Nvidia GeForce FX 5900 Ultra

Reviewed on 5/22/03    Editors' note: Because of the recent discovery of additional 3DMark03-specific optimizations built into the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra's display drivers, we retested this card using a procedure that thwarts these optimizations.

The next great heavyweight bout is underway in the high-end systems for game enthusiasts, and we don't mean a cool, new boxing game. ATI and Nvidia have been waging a fierce battle for the right to say that it--and not the other--has the world's speediest GPU (graphics processing unit), and both have recently landed new punches.

Nvidia's latest contender is the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, the successor to its GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. When the 5800 Ultra finally hit the market, it was months late, contained a very noisy fan, and took up two slots on a system's backplane. And if that wasn't enough, its performance did not live up to expectations. Outcry from the gaming community did not fall on deaf ears, and Nvidia got a successor to the 5800 Ultra out the door as soon as possible. Although it's not as quiet as a church mouse, the 5900 Ultra's fan won't draw comparisons to a Dustbuster vacuum, either. The 5900 Ultra, however, is just as bulky as the 5800 Ultra, and it still takes up two slots.

With a few architectural changes to the GPU, it is no surprise that the 5900 Ultra is noticeably faster than the 5800 Ultra. The 5900 Ultra doubles the 5800 Ultra's memory interface from 128 bits to 256 bits, and the onboard memory jumps from 128MB to 256MB. The 5900 Ultra also adds a few new texture-compression technologies. Nvidia also had a few more months of driver development to further optimize the driver--always a big factor when it comes to boosting performance.

Nvidia sent us a reference-design version of the 5900 Ultra and beta drivers, which we pitted against the latest release from ATI, the Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB. Determining which of the two cards is fastest, however, is not as easy as one might think.

When we originally ran our 3DMark03 (Build 320) tests, the 5900 Ultra ran circles around the 9800 Pro 256MB. During testing, however, it came to light that some possibly unorthodox rendering techniques were being used by the 5900 Ultra's display drivers, which were artificially inflating its scores. The developer of 3DMark03, Futuremark, quickly released an updated version of the benchmark (Build 330), which defeated the known 3DMark03-specific optimizations built into the current Nvidia driver. With the updated version of 3DMark03, the 5900 Ultra's 3DMark03 scores dropped from 14 to 22 percent, depending on the resolution and the feature settings. At both 1,024x768 and 1,600x1,200 with no advanced features enabled, the 9800 Pro 256MB was noticeably faster. However, once antialiasing and anisotropic filtering were enabled, the performance of the two cards was almost identical.

Unfortunately, the discovery of Nvidia's 3DMark03-specific driver optimizations did not stop there. We soon discovered that the display driver that we tested with was performing additional optimizations when anisotropic filtering was enabled, potentially reducing image quality. Simply by renaming the 3DMark03 executable from "3DMark03.exe" to "3DMork03.exe," we were able to disable these optimizations. Our retests resulted in a reduction of the 5900 Ultra's anisotropic filtering performance by another 8 percent and furnished a slight performance advantage to the 9800 Pro 256MB.

In the Flyby-Antalus portion of our Unreal Tournament 2003 tests, the 5900 Ultra was consistently faster than the 9800 Pro 256MB. However, on the less-GPU-intensive Botmatch-Antalus portion of the test, the results were more mixed, with both cards taking the lead, depending on the individual test.

The tables turned somewhat in the Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell tests, with the 9800 Pro 256MB besting the 5900 Ultra when we enabled the highest-quality settings--albeit never more than by 8 percent.

The bell has sounded, and we have the always unpopular split decision. In the end though, it's difficult to declare which card is the performance champ. Nvidia has at least caught up with ATI again in terms of superfast 3D graphics performance. However, if we learn of additional driver optimizations that further reduce the 5900 Ultra's performance when disabled, we might have to revisit our decision yet again.

Expect to see GeForce FX 5900 Ultra boards by the middle of June selling for $499 from numerous vendors, including Asus, BFG, Creative Labs, and PNY. There will also be a 128MB version available for $399.

Futuremark's 3DMark03  (Longer bars indicate better performance) 1,600x1,200    1,600x1,200 with 4x antialiasing    1,600x1,200 with 4x antialiasing and 4x anisotropic filtering

Nvidia GeForce FX 5900 Ultra w/ 3DMark03 Build 320 3458  2323  1952  ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB w/ 3DMark03 Build 330 3215  1780  1611  Nvidia GeForce FX 5900 Ultra w/ 3DMark03 Build 330 2821  1817  1625  Nvidia GeForce FX 5900 Ultra w/ 3DMark03 Build 330 w/ 3DMark03 executable renamed 2821  1817  1503

 

Unreal Tournament 2003 test: Flyby-Antalus (in fps)  (Longer bars indicate better performance) 1,600x1,200    1,600x1,200 with 4x antialiasing    1,600x1,200 with 4x antialiasing and 4x anisotropic filtering

Nvidia GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 119.5  83.1  61.6  ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB 94.7  68.8  56.5

 

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell test (in fps)  (Longer bars indicate better performance) 1,024x768 with medium quality settings    1,024x768 with high quality settings    1,600x1,200 with medium quality settings    1,600x1,200 with high quality settings

Nvidia GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 66.9  47.4  51.6  35.3  ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB 65.4  51.4  51.7  38.0

 
Find out more about how we test graphics cards.

• 7.4/10

  Average user rating from 45 users

  Very good
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• 8/10 Excellent

  January 12, 2005

  "Hasn't let me down yet!!" Read more >>

• 10/10 Perfect

  September 28, 2004

  "IT IS AWESOME!!" Read more >>

• 3/10 Poor

  September 9, 2004

  "poor support hard to install" Read more >>

• 2/10 Terrible

  October 24, 2003

  "this is why NVidia's Major stock holder (SGI) is showcasing ATI's product..." Read more >>

• 10/10 Perfect

  October 16, 2003

  "Better than at in all ways" Read more >>

• 9/10 Spectacular

  October 4, 2003

  "The Solid & Reliable Card we are looking for" Read more >>

• 7/10 Very good

  September 1, 2003

  "Get the regular 5900 FX." Read more >>

• 7/10 Very good

  August 30, 2003

  "Great Product Heres why" Read more >>

• 9/10 Spectacular

  August 15, 2003

  "OWNS AS SIMPLE AS THAT" Read more >>

• 8/10 Excellent

  August 4, 2003

  "RELIABILITY" Read more >>

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