GeForce FX 5900 Ultra Preview

The GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 
A Preview And Performance Analysis With NVIDIA's New Killer

By - Dave Altavilla
May 12, 2003

Why not get our Quake 3 Arena on?  This dinosaur of a game engine still looks decent at high resolution, with all the eye candy turn up to max.  This is exactly how we tested with Q3, of course.

Quake 3 and Serious Sam SE Testing Old Game Engines Die Hard

There is a very interesting story being told here in these Quake 3 benchmarks.  The NV35 is on top by small margins, without AA or Aniso enabled.  This is indicative of a more CPU limited condition than anything else.  However, turn on 4X AA and the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra surges past the R9800 Pro by 16 - 27%, depending on the resolution.  Yet when we enable Aniso Filtering, the gap closes dramatically, with the GFFX 5900 U losing out to the R9800 Pro at 1024 and pulling ahead by only a small percentage at 1600X1200.  This is indicative with the struggle NVIDIA is still having with respect to performance optimizations in their Anisotropic Filtering techniques.

Even at high res, Serious Sam SE just isn't taxing enough on these high end graphics cards.  However, turn on AA and you begin to separate the men from the boys, where the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra takes the lead with a 10 to 16% gain over the Radeon 9800 Pro.

Comanche 4 and Unreal Tournament 2003