ASUS’ lineup

ASUS turned lots of heads at the end of last year when they announced that they would be manufacturing graphics cards based on ATI’s entire family of RADEON graphics chips. This includes ATI’s most recent announcements, the RADEON 9800 XT/9600 XT and RADEON 9600 SE.

Despite this, ASUS has not abandoned its relationship with NVIDIA. As one of NVIDIA’s oldest graphics partners, with products dating all the way back to the original RIVA 128, this would have come as quite a surprise (although it’s still a major coup for ATI).

ATI uses a duct for their cooler

ASUS is single slot

Both cards require external power

ASUS’ strategy going forward is to manufacture cards based on graphics technology from both camps. This protects ASUS if say, one manufacturer misses a deadline on an upcoming product launch, and is also preferred by most consumers as it encourages more competition. This competition has been particularly lacking on the ATI side, as Sapphire, ATI, and to a lesser extent, Powercolor (CP Technology) have ruled the roost.

One interesting side affect of this new strategy is that ASUS doesn’t offer a top to bottom solution of NVIDIA graphics products. For instance, ASUS will not be offering a graphics card based on NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5700 Ultra core. At Comdex we were told that chips were in short supply. Quite frankly, it really doesn’t make much sense for ASUS to offer the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra anyway, as it’s currently priced too closely to the GeForce FX 5900 XT/GeForce FX 5900 128MB. At $200, the GeForce FX 5900 XT actually lists for $20 less than the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and offers more performance!

For the mainstream market, ASUS will offer the vanilla GeForce FX 5700 however. Two variants are planned, a 128MB card and a 256MB version.

GeForce FX 5950 Ultra core

ASUS’ V9980 Ultra follows NVIDIA’s specifications for the NV38 graphics core that the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra is based on. Namely, the graphics core and memory are both clocked at 475MHz (950MHz effective in the case of the DDR memory). When you couple this with the four pixel pipeline with two texture units per pixel pipeline architecture that the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra utilizes, peak fill rate offered equates to 3.8 Gigatexels/second, while memory bandwidth tops out at 30.4GB/sec. Both figures are the highest in the industry.

Much slimmer profile on ASUS card

Can you guess the 5950 Ultra card?

Note the missing Philips chip on the V9950 Ultra

Other than the new clock speeds, GeForce FX 5950 Ultra is essentially the same chip as GeForce FX 5900 Ultra. This means that all of NVIDIA’s latest technologies such as UltraShadow and Intellisample HCT are all found here, but the most important is arguably CineFX 2.0. In our tests with benchmarks such as ShaderMark and Tomb Raider, we’ve found that the changes implemented in CineFX 2.0 enhance the 2.0 shading prowess of GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and 5950 Ultra, although it still remains to be seen how the card will perform with upcoming games such as Half-Life 2.