NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5700 Ultra

Name: NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5700 Ultra - Page 4
Brand: NVIDIA's

by HH Editor — Thursday, October 23, 2003, 01:08 PM EDT

NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5700 Ultra
NVIDIA's immediate answer to the 9600 XT

By Robert Maloney
October 23rd, 2003

Performances Comparisons With Final Fantasy XI v2.0

Chocobos finally make it to the big screen

Final Fantasy is a title that is more well known by console users, but it appears that Squaresoft is ready to make the jump to the PC, with a MMORPG version of the classic. The demo version comes bundled with a benchmark, which displays a score is displayed every time it makes a full cycle. Although it was meant more for checking a system's readiness to play the game, we found that we could get a meaningful test by setting it to high-res and dividing the score (rendered frames) by the time elapsed to get the frame rate.

We weren't sure how this benchmark was going to go, since it's hard to tell just by watching the score accumulate how the card is faring. The numbers zipped by in some parts, and it seemed that some of the graphics popped into focus instead of being drawn in slowly. At any rate, we took the final score and divided it by the time it took to run the test to get the final frame rate. The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra was the leader, followed by the 9600 XT and then the 5600.

Benchmarks / Comparison With Gun Metal

With gameplay like this, we can't wait to play the real thing

Yeti Studios has also released a benchmark that is based on a real game. According to Yeti, it is designed to push the latest DX9 based cards to the limit using Pixel and Vertex Shaders to display a rapidly changing battlefield. To help achieve this, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are built into the engine, and cannot be disabled. As such, the average frame rates are lower than one should expect with the actual game, so don't be discouraged by the scores that you see in the graphs below. The benchmark was run twice; once at 1024x768x32, and again at 1280x1024x32.

When it came to Gun Metal, at least, we had to take back our earlier statements about NVIDIA and DX9 shaders. This benchmark was utterly dominated by the 5700 Ultra, and we had to check our results since the margin of difference was so great. We're talking a performance difference of more than 35% over the Radeon 9600 XT, and 45% on top of the 5600 Ultra.

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