Introduction

Well folks, if you doubted NVIDIA’s ability to deliver GeForce FX 5900 on time, its official: the GeForce FX 5900 family has landed! In fact, the first wave of GeForce FX 5900 cards arrived last week. The eVGA e-GeForce FX 5900 Ultra card we’re reviewing today was the first GeForce FX 5900 Ultra card to hit the market, although other board partners are putting the finishing touches on their GeForce FX 5900 products as we speak.

With the arrival of GeForce FX 5900 and GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, NVIDIA finally has products to service the high-end segment of the 3D graphics market, a sector they’ve been MIA since Fall ’02. NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5800 series was meant to take on this challenge, but product delays slipped it from September ’02 to Q1’03. As we all know by now, the product ultimately never shipped in significant quantities and has now been discontinued. To add insult to injury, NVIDIA has removed all traces of GeForce FX 5800 from its website.

Last chance gas at sunset

Deserted gas station

Note the lighting and shadows

NVIDIA’s engineering team has been quietly working on GeForce FX 5900 all along however, allowing them to bring it online right on schedule. In fact, NVIDIA went into full production on GeForce FX 5900 from first silicon. With ATI’s revised DX9 part, RADEON 9800, making its debut, GeForce FX 5900 couldn’t come soon enough

Pretty antiquated gas station

Not quite the place you'd want to get stranded

Is that supposed to be a garage?

eVGA is one of ten card manufacturers that will be bringing GeForce FX 5900 cards to market initially. While eVGA is one of the newer card manufacturers overall (founded less than a handful of years ago), their meteoric rise to Tier One board partner status is a pretty remarkable story. But we’re not here to bore you with a company backgrounder; you want to know what makes the e-GeForce FX 5900 Ultra tick, and fortunately, eVGA has built something special for the hardcore crowd with the e-GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, we’re not looking at a “stock” graphics card here folks.

3D back in the days

If you fast-forward to the late nineties, there were two types of graphics card manufacturers: those who played it safe and stuck with vanilla graphics card offerings, and those who catered to the high-end enthusiast, Canopus being the most popular example of the latter category. These manufacturers would add unique features to their products, running their boards at higher clock speeds, or in the case of Canopus’ Voodoo2-based Pure3D, offering more onboard graphics memory.

Look at the pretty textures

Another shot at sunset

Where is everybody?

Over time the conservative manufacturers won out, their more traditional products were easy to produce and sold in huge bulks, the companies oriented towards enthusiasts just couldn’t match the aggressive pricing of the bigger players and eventually faded away. The golden age of hot-rodded graphics cards from the factory had ended. Or has it?

Phone booth and windmill in the distance

Would you even want gas from this station?

Hi Dusk

Fortunately for enthusiasts, more aggressive product offerings are becoming en vogue again. We’re not talking racing stripes and flashy packaging, either. ABIT’s OTES series of graphics cards added an exotic heat pipe cooling solution to NVIDIA’s GeForce4 GPU while Sapphire’s RADEON 9700 PRO Ultimate Edition also uses heat pipe technology to bring silent 3D graphics to the high-end sector. However, the majority of these more striking cards don’t offer any added performance over competing cards based on the same graphics chip. With the e-GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, eVGA aims to change this.