Final Verdict

FiringSquad says:

With its 475MHz core and vastly superior memory subsystem, the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra is able to outperform ATI’s RADEON 9600 XT in many situations. As a result, we can definitely say that the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra firmly re-establishes NVIDIA’s presence in the mainstream segment of the graphics market.

It offers all the performance to power today’s latest games, and it’s looking like it will be more than competent for many of the DirectX 9 games of tomorrow. We wouldn’t dare declare one architecture “faster” than the other at this point however, as each has their strengths and weaknesses. Let’s just call it a performance draw for right now.

What NVIDIA does offer however is better overall compatibility with a wide variety of software applications, games, and hardware (although they still need to resolve AA support with a few DX9 titles). ATI is certainly improving quickly in this regard, but they still have more work to be done. Now if someone can just tell NVIDIA’s Detonator team to give gamers trilinear filtering when he or she asks for it, maybe some of the frustration many are feeling with NVIDIA will go away.

The manufacturing problems of the past appear to be just that, a thing of the past. We’ll have to wait and see how many other card manufacturers have their GeForce FX 5700 Ultra boards ready before we can say that with confidence however.

As far as eVGA, they’ve developed another solid offering with the e-GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. While it is based entirely on NVIDIA’s reference design, you will have the peace of mind of knowing that you’ve got a card built to NVIDIA’s specs. We would’ve liked to have seen eVGA deviate from the reference clock speeds as they did with their GeForce FX 5900 Ultra card, the e-GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, but we guess they’d rather focus on the merits of their card and leave the overclocking to the enthusiasts. Our overclocking results certainly suggest the core and memory have a lot of frequency headroom.

eVGA cards tend to be priced very competitively and can be found all over Price Watch, so we have a feeling that this will probably be one of the more popular first generation GeForce FX 5700 Ultra cards. After all, it always helps to be one of the first to market. When you combine this with eVGA’s excellent service and support, you’ve got a card that should be a tempting upgrade for the guy on a budget who wants a card that performs well, yet just as importantly, is backed by a company you can depend on.