IT'S TIME to talk little bit about Nvidia's future plans now that ATI has introduced its mainstream and high end solution based on the speed bumps of previous marchitectures.
Anand got the green light to benchmark but Geforce FX5700 Ultra numbers, we are still not sure his "twice blessed" numbers are final. Anand tested cards at 475MHz/900 MHz memory and we guess those figures aren't too much out of kilter.
We can confirm that Geforce FX 5700 is going to work slower than the now infamous MSI slides suggested. The card will be able to rock on magic 475 and 900 MHz memory, even though MSI suggested that card will work at 500 MHz core and 1000 MHz memory. Well 475MHz is a clear indication that 500MHz was too much in terms of yields and 1000 MHz DDR memory costs that dollar too far.
The memory will use the expected 128 bit interface and we learned that the Ultra version will have DDR 2 memory at 900MHz.
It will be interesting to see which firm – Nvidia or ATI - will win the mid range market, the FX5700 or Radeon 9600XT as both cards should deliver similar performance for $199.