NVIDIA GeForceFX 5700 Ultra and FX 5950 Ultra

[Rys]

A little late in publishing, post NDA expiry, something we've had to adjust back to after recent antics, I managed to take a look at NVIDIA's new toys, 5700 Ultra and 5950 Ultra.

It looks like NVIDIA are on to a winner with their new mid-range entrant. Price is what's most exciting, with it being set at $199 (yes, for the 900MHz mem equipped Ultra version) it's a firm competitor to 9600XT. With it beating 9600XT in the majority of our tests, I can clearly see why NVIDIA are more excited about 5700 Ultra than any other FX product so far.

NV38 is more evolution than revolution, being no more than a speed bumped NV35. However it seems to overclock a lot better than the outgoing version, pointing to core enhancements and elimination of hot spots, to give it some headroom. It's as quick as 9800XT for the most part, something we'll confirm properly with a new suite of tests in reviews featuring boards from retail partners. It's just a little too pricey.

Check out the full article here.

Rys

[TooNice]

Well, I would say that the 5700 Ultra is one of the more interesting Nvidia offering in the recent days..

Anandtech also had a review of the card out today:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1910

The conclusions are pretty much the same. The 5700 Ultra is overall better than the XT it seems.

Looking at their conclusions though, I am glad I picked up a 9700Pro recently
The price is of a "mid-high" range card. And yet, it performs pretty much like a high end.

[Act10]

I was initially puzzled how I could continue to read articles on various sites where positions jockey between ATI and Nvidia. But it is now starting to become fairly clear, if you choose older outdated benchmarks (that basically run well enough even on mid to low range ATI and Nvidia cards) then Nvidia review well. If you choose a suite of state of the art Direct X 9 games which at the end of the day are the only reason one should consider buying these high end cards then Nvidia seem to flounder. If anyone has any doubts read the latest article on HardOCP about the 5700 and 5950.

[Rys]

Why would you spend £150+ on a card to only play half a dozen games? The DX9 title base is infinitely smaller than the DX6-DX8 class base.

Given that most DX9 titles aren't really DX9 at all (one or two shaders doesn't count) or poorly ported from a console (GM2, Halo?), and some excellent new titles still use DX8 (Max Payne 2), I really have a hard time accepting the DX9 case for a card purchase sometimes.

However, we endeavour to review using benchmarks everyone likes to read about, so we'll be adding fresher titles to our review lineup in due course.

Cheers for registering to let us know your viewpoint

Rys

[Act10]

No one spends big money on a video card without an eye to the future. I have no problem with you including popular DirectX 8 titles, but to make a recommendation to buy a card without commenting on how ones investment is likely to perform in the future is a dereliction of your duty.

Hard OCP actually review Max Payne 2 and the 9800XT is 61% faster than the 5950 at the min FPS (probably the most important measure). You did'nt review perhaps if you had alarm bells may have started to ring.

[Act10]

How did Driver Heavan reach their conclusion and Hexus reach theirs.

So who should consider this card as an upgrade? Put up against the 9600 XT I just can’t recommend anyone to buy the 5700 Ultra. It’s clear that Nvidia can squeeze performance out of the card…3DMark shows that. However people buy cards to play games and there is no way Nvidia can optimise their FX range for performance in every game that is released. Nothing emphasises the situation FX users are going to be in more often than not than Max Payne 2, a game that is a week old and which no manufacturer has had time to optimise for, there really is no competition in the performance here.

It saddens me to say that for another cycle Nvidia don’t have a card to compete with the market leader in the mainstream area. And that is not good for the industry.

[Act10]

A quote from the FiringSquad with regard to their testing of Unreal Tournament 2003. Note Hexus shows the 5750 as having the upperhand in their article over the 9600XT. Perhaps under a level playing field this would not be the case.

Notes
While we don’t want to spoil the results of Chris’ upcoming Image Quality Shootout article, which just missed today’s launches, we did want to let you know that NVIDIA’s Detonator 52.16 driver still disables trilinear filtering in UT2K3, so we went ahead and manually adjusted the RADEON cards to a similar filtering level, which turned out to be the “Performance” setting.

As you can see, the RADEON cards are actually still competitive with NVIDIA’s pseudo-trilinear even in default settings, but we didn’t want to give the impression that GeForce FX 5700 Ultra was “faster” per se in this test, as clearly it does less work than ATI by default.

[DR]

Look at every other review.... Find a bag of salt