PNY GeForce FX 5900 Ultra

Company: PNY
Product: GeForce FX 5900 Ultra
Street Price: ~$499
Date Reviewed: July 22, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao

Introduction:

It is time again for a new video card to try to compete with the Radeon 9800 Pro. The GeForce FX5800 originally was supposed to be the competitor with the ATi chips but as we all know, there were a few issues that made the card a bad performer. The 5900 Ultra is the what the 5800 Ultra should have been and maybe a little more. Today we take a look at the PNY 5900 Ultra graphics card and compare it to the two fastest cards we have, ATi 9700 Pro and a Sapphire 9800 Pro. We hope to find out if this $500 video card can out perform our 9800 Pro. Also, we are going to keep this review short because we just want to compare the two fastest cards from ATi and NVIDIA.

How will NVIDIA's latest video card compare to the 9800 Pro? In theory it should be faster but you'll have to read on to find out how much faster the card is and if it will justify the $100 difference between the two video cards.

Specifications:

KEY FEATURES & BENEFITS

• 256-bit memory interface with advanced memory control
  Delivers more memory bandwidth and efficiency to power the latest games and applications at blazing speeds
• 128-bit studio precision computation
  Ensures the best image quality for even the most demanding applications
• Advanced Pixel Shader Technology
  Allows floating point shader operations to run 2x faster than previous generation GPU's
• NVIDIA Ultra Shadow™ Technology
  Designed to enhance the performance of bleeding-edge games that use complex shadows
• Vertex Shader 2.0+ and Pixel Shader 2.0+
  Stunning and complex special effects are possible while delivering faster and smoother game play
• NVIDIA Intellisample™ high-resolution compression technology
  The industries fastest and highest quality anti-aliasing for superior image quality
• Microsoft® DirectX 9.0 Optimizations and Support
  Ensures the best performance and application compatibility for all DirectX 9 applications
  OpenGL 1.4
  Ensures the best performance and compatibility for all OpenGL applications

PERFORMANCE FEATURES

• CineFX 2.0 Graphics Engine

• 256-bit graphics core

• 450MHz core clock

• 256-bit memory interface

• 850MHz Memory Data Rate

• 27.2 GB/sec. memory bandwidth

• 3.6 billion texels/sec. fill rate

• 338 million vertices/sec

• 8 pixels per clock (peak)

• 16 textures per pixel(max in a single rendering pass)with 8 textures applied per clock

• Dual 400MHz RAMDAC's

• Max display resolution 2048 x 1536 x 32 bpp at 85Hz