NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5900 XT

By clicking on the Advanced button from the display settings, we can access the ForceWare control panels.  The first tab displays basic information about the card type, amount of RAM, as well as the DirectX and ForceWare versions installed.  The Change Resolutions window gives the user all of the main display settings at a glance, even allowing for custom resolutions and refresh rates.  Should these settings require any tweaking, one simply needs to go to Color Correction.  In addition to standard color controls, users can also enable Digital Vibrance, a proprietary technology that digitally controls the color separation and intensity.

Have two monitors, but not sure what to do with both of them?  Connect them to the 5900 SE and run the nView wizard to quickly setup a multiple monitor environment.  Users can also divide the monitor into separate regions and quickly reposition and resize application windows.  Individual profiles let you customize the driver settings for different configurations which can be quickly recalled when needed.  Using the Coolbits registry hack, we were able to view the standard and performance clock speeds of the GPU and Memory.  At 2D (desktop), the 5900 XT is only running at 300MHz, thus running cooler and putting less wear and tear on the GPU.  During 3D game play, the 5900 XT automatically cranks itself up to 400MHz for more power.  The memory remains clocked at 700MHz.  The slider bars on these screens are also used for overclocking purposes, something we will get to a little bit later.

Unlike ATi's Catalyst drivers, which require that anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering be set individually for Direct3D and OpenGL, a single slider on the Quality and Performance controls both with NVIDIA's cards.  Each device can be left at application-controlled, or set to as high as 8 samples for each.  Further optimizations for Direct3D and OpenGL games can be made on the individual tabs for each, such as defining the mip-map detail in Direct3D and disabling Vertical Sync in OpenGL.

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 XT	ATi Radeon 9600 XT
No AA	No AA
2X AA	2X AA
4X AA	4X AA
6X AA	6X AA
6X AA + 8X AF	6X AA + 8XAF

      
The results may be, well, underwhelming.  Without anti-aliasing, both cards exhibit the same degree of jaggedness, best viewed where the back edge of the tank meets the cloudy sky.  The screenshots are otherwise quite similar, and we can't really judge one as being better than the other.  Moving onwards to 2XAA, it seems that NVIDIA has the cleaner lines.  This is somewhat of a first since usually we find ATi has better AA image quality.  At 4X and 6X AA, the lines are looking really sharp with both cards.  No apparent details are missing from the Reichstag in the background - nothing looks fuzzy or washed out.  The only true distinction that we can make is when we enabled anisotropic filtering in the drivers.  Only here can we make an observation that the structure at the top of the building looks a lot "cleaner" on the Radeon 9600 XT.  Otherwise, we're quite pleased with the quality from both companies. 

Need for Speed: Underground Screenshots
1280x1024x32 - Maximum Quality Settings

OK, so what are we looking at here?  These two pictures are from another recent release, EA Games' Need for Speed: Underground.  We've included these two screenshots for pure visceral enjoyment.  We were able to drive smoothly down the tracks all the while having in-game display settings set to their maximum and driver settings set to 4XAA and 8X Anisotropic.  And, let's be frank, you were thinking about getting this card to play games with all the bells and whistles turned on, right?