MSI FX5200-TDR128

Company: Micro-Star International (MSI)
Product: FX5200-TDR128
Street Price: ~$115 USD
Date Reviewed: May 10, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey C.
Overall Rating: (9/10)

Introduction:

Awhile back we saw the release of the NVIDIA NV34 graphics processor. When the chip was released, it was not as fast as everyone was expecting. It still provides decent performance at a bargain cost and is designed to compete with other budget cards from ATi. However the competition is small since the 5200 is one of the only video cards in its price range that offers DirectX 9 support.

Micro-Star International (MSI) is one of the largest motherboard manufacturers in the industry. A lot of people are surprised when they find out that MSI also makes video cards. As one of NVIDIA's launch partners, MSI has released the FX5200-TDR128 video card based on the NV34 graphics core. This particular video card is designed for the budget consumers but still offers many features that some of the higher end video cards do not have. Let us take a look at the MSI FX5200-TDR128 to see how MSI has bundled the card and how well the card performs.

Specifications:

 CineFX Shading Architecture
 • Support for DX 9.0 Pixel/Vertex Shader 2.0+
 • Very long pixel programs up to 1024 instructions
 • Very long vertex programs with up to 256 static instructions and up to 65536 instructions executed before termination
 • Looping and subroutines with up to 256 loops per vertex program
 • Subroutines in shader programs
 • Dynamic flow control
 • Conditional write masking
 • Conditional execution
 • Procedural shading
 • Full instruction set for vertex and pixel programs
 • Z-correct bump-mapping
 • Hardware-accelerated shadow effects with shadow buffers
 • Two-sided stencil
 • Programmable matrix palette skinning
 • Keyframe animation
 • Custom lens effects: fish eye, wide angle, fresnel effects, water refraction

 High-Performance, High-Precision, 3D Rendering Engine
 • 8 pixels per clock rendering engine
 • 128-bit, studio-quality floating point precision through the entire graphics pipeline
 • Native support for 128-bit floating point, 64-bit floating point and 32-bit integer rendering modes
 • Up to 16 textures per pass
 • Support for sRGB texture format for gamma textures
 • DirectX and S3TC texture compression

 High-Performance 2D Rendering Engine
 • Optimized for 32-, 24-, 16-, 15- and 8-bpp modes
 • True-color, 64x64 hardware cursor with alpha
 • Multi-buffering (double, triple or quad) for smooth animation and video playback
 • True-color, 64x64 hardware cursor with alpha

 Advanced Display Pipeline with Full nView Capabilities
 • Dual, 400MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536@85Hz
 • Integrated NTSC/PAL TV encoder support resolutions up to 1024x768 without the need for panning with built-in Macrovision copy protection
 • Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full quality and features in each window
 • DVD and HDTV-ready MPEG-2 decoding up to 1920x1080i resolutions
 • Dual DVO ports for interfacing to external TMDS transmitters and external HDTV encoders
 • Support for dual-link DVI for compatibility with next-generation flat panel displays with resolutions greater than 1600x1200 without the need for reduced blanking

 Digital Vibrance control (DVC) 3.0
 • DVC color controls
 • DVC image sharpening controls

 Operation Systems and API support
 • Windowsฎ XP / 2000 / Me / 98 / 95
 • Complete DirectX support, including DirectX 9.0 and lower
 • Full OpenGL 1.4 and lower

 Compatibility
 • NVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
 • Fully compliant professional OpenGL 1.4 API with NVIDIA extensions, on all Linux and Windows operating systems
 • WHQL-certified for Windowsฎ XP, Windowsฎ Me, Windowsฎ 200