Ballistics Report

Pros

Performance: When it comes to performance, the e-GeForce FX 5700 Ultra is certainly no slouch. As you saw in our performance testing, the e-GeForce FX 5700 Ultra is quite a performer, running neck-and-neck with its closest competitor, the ATI RADEON 9600 XT in many benchmarks.

Sure, it’s not going to take down a GeForce FX 5900 or RADEON 9800, but with only four pixel pipelines and a 128-bit memory interface, it certainly performs well. This is largely thanks to its blazing DDR2 memory, which provides up to 14.4GB/sec of memory bandwidth. That’s an improvement of nearly 5GB/sec over RADEON 9600 XT, which operates 300MHz slower. NVIDIA does give up a little bit of fill-rate to ATI, but when you combine this with the performance enhancements found in NVIDIA’s Detonator 52.16 driver, the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra performs very competitively.

Price: It may not come with a free voucher for Half-Life 2, but the e-GeForce FX 5700 Ultra is still priced to move at $200. When we heard that NVIDIA would be shipping the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra with high-end 900MHz DDR2 memory, we figured it would be expensive. After all, the GeForce FX 5800 which used similar RAM was officially priced at $400 when it launched.

Of course, GeForce FX 5700 Ultra isn’t a 130 million transistor chip, but we’re still looking at a card with a very expensive board design.

In any case, it’s great to see NVIDIA insert the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra right in the slot occupied by the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, despite the higher manufacturing costs. By the way, if $200 is still too rich for your blood, prices on GeForce FX 5600 Ultra cards should continue to drop as 5700 Ultra boards hit retail. Eventually these cards will disappear, so they may be a pretty tempting upgrade if the price is right.

Availability: Unlike the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, which was practically stillborn upon its re-launch in May, GeForce FX 5700 Ultra boards will actually be available. GeForce FX 5700 boards should slowly trickle onto the market as well, but the 5700 Ultra’s are in the final stages of shipping as we speak, if they haven’t already (they’re set to hit retail this weekend).

eVGA support: All too often you see examples of video card manufacturers who don’t stand behind their product. Fortunately, eVGA isn’t one of those companies. eVGA demonstrated this last summer during the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra launch. Many end users had problems with their boards in 3DMark 03 that were the cause of a bad BIOS. Once eVGA tracked the problem down, a fix was issued immediately, but in the meantime eVGA was promptly replacing cards for those who had problems. It’s this kind of excellent customer service that’s so hard to find in the industry these days. We have no doubt that eVGA earned countless repeat customers as a result of this.

Cons

DX9 game support via drivers: As it stands now, NVIDIA’s in a position where they’re having to optimize specifically for DirectX 9 games. This isn’t a problem if the game you’re currently playing has been optimized by NVIDIA, but what about the titles of tomorrow or that obscure first-person shooter they haven’t looked at? In these cases, we just don’t know.

It’s this kind of uncertainty that has the whole industry guessing what’s going to happen next. NVIDIA is working on a compiler that should help the situation, and they’re working with many game developers to optimize their code for GeForce FX hardware from the start. But one thing’s for certain, it’s going to be more important than ever to make sure you keep your drivers up to date if you have an NVIDIA DX9 board.