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Recently it
seems as though NVIDIA has made a few wrong moves, that
got them a ton of bad press. First, there was the whole
3DMark03 situation. Then came the Unreal Tournament 2003
filtering "bug". These issues along with all of the
resulting commentary were significant and had to be
discussed, but they distracted many people from the fact
that NVIDIA's NV35 GPU was a very noteworthy product.
With the NV35, now named the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, NVIDIA
eliminated most of the 5800 Ultra's shortcomings. The 5900
Ultra enjoys the benefits of a 256-bit wide memory bus and
some tweaks to the manufacturing process allowed them to
use a much quieter cooling solution. This, in addition to
the fact, that the 5900 Ultra is faster then a 5800 Ultra
in virtually all meaningful benchmarks, means serious
enthusiasts should consider the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra for
any high-end gaming rig.
Today on
HotHardware.Com we're going to take a look at Asus' take
on the NV35, the V9950 Ultra. This card sports 256MB of
high-speed memory and a custom cooler that won't eat up
your first PCI slot. Read on to see what we thought
of Asus' current flagship video card...
CLICK ANY IMAGE FOR AN
ENLARGED VIEW
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Specifications & Features of the Asus V9550
Ultra |
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NVIDIA's Flagship GPU (For Now) |
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NV35 and GeForce FX
5900 Ultra:
- .13u Manufacturing
Process
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256-Bit GPU - 450MHz Clock Speed
- Flip-Chip BGA
Package with copper interconnects
- Up To 8 Pixels Per
Clock Processing (or 4x2 depending on circumstance)
- 1 TMU Per Pipe (16
Textures per unit)
-
256-bit Memory Architecture
- CineFX 2.0 for
Cinematic Special Effects
- "UltraShadow"
Hardware Shadow Acceleration
- 2x floating point
pixel shader performance of NV30
- 256-bit Memory
Architecture
-
256MB of DDR/DDR2
- 2nd Generation
compression & caching
-
256MB High Speed Frame Buffer
- AGP 4X/8x
- DVI + VGA + TV /
VIVO
- Full DirectX 9.0 &
OpenGL Support
Features:
- CineFX 2.0 for
Cinematic Special Effects
- Intellisample
HCT - Next Generation Antialiasing, Anisotropic
Filtering and Compression
- Hardware
Acceleration for Shadows
- Full DX9 Compliance
- 64-Bit
Floating-Point Color
- 128-Bit
Floating-Point Color
- 2 x 400MHz Internal
RAMDACs
- Long Program length
for Pixel and Vertex Shading
- Unified Vertex and
Pixel Shading instruction set
- Unified Driver
Architecture
- nView 2.0 -
Multi-Display Technology
- Digital Vibrance
Control 3.0
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Memory:
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850MHz
DDR
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256-Bit
Bus Width
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128MB &
256MB Memory Capacity
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3rd.
Generation Lightspeed Memory Architecture
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Effective bandwidth - 27.2GB/s actual @ 850MHz
CLICK TO ENLARGE
THE
GEFORCE FX 5900 ULTRA
CORE CLOCK: 450MHz
MEMORY CLOCK: 850MHz
FILLRATE: 3.6 GP/s
MEMORY BANDWIDTH: 27.1 GB/s
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The V9950
Ultra shipped with a very complete assortment of bundled
accessories and software. For those looking to run a
dual analog monitor setup, Asus includes a DVI-to-DB15
adapter, otherwise the card is equipped with single DB15
and DVI connectors (CRT + LCD). A standard S-Video
cable is also included to compliment this card's TV-Out
capabilities. There is quite a bit of software
included with the card as well. Aside from the
obligatory User's Manual and Quick Start Guide, we found a
driver / utility CD, which obviously contained drivers,
but it also had some useful utilities like Asus'
SmartDoctor program. Basically, SmartDoctor gives
users the ability to overclock their card but we're still
partial to using CoolBits (call us minimalists!).
Asus also
included a copy of their AsusDVD XP playback software and
a "Games Power" CD with demos of some recent games like
Splinter Cell, Big Mutha Truckers and Warcraft III.
Lastly, three complete games were also bundled with the
V9950 Ultra; the DX9 game Gun Metal, Delta Force: Black
Hawk Down and Battle Engine Aquila. Overall, we feel
Asus did a good job with configuring the V9950 Ultra's
bundle. It seems like Asus covered all of the bases.
Next Up - The Card &
Some Eye Candy
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