Specifications

Dusk loves to dance

Looking all snazzy for the camera

Dusk likes to wear a little more clothing than her sister

You’re probably fairly familiar with the guts behind eVGA’s e-GeForce FX 5900 Ultra so we won’t go into too many details on the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra core. The key highlights are that it boasts a 450MHz core clock frequency and is paired with 256MB of DDR memory. Its predecessor, GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, shipped at a 500MHz core clock frequency with 1GHz DDR2 memory, but since its memory interface was only 128 bits wide it only offered up to 16GB/sec of bandwidth to the GPU.

Blowing at the butterfiles

You can see individual pores on her skin

Now if they can just get Dusk and Dawn in the same demo

GeForce FX 5900 Ultra doubles the size of the memory interface to 256 bits, boosting peak memory to 27.2GB/sec; the highest figure in the industry. Since both cards utilize the same four pixel pipeline with two texture units per pixel pipeline (4x2) architecture, GeForce FX 5800 Ultra technically boasts a higher fill rate (thanks to its higher core clock frequency) but with the wider interface and optimizations NVIDIA has made to its pixel shading engine, the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra should offer better overall performance, especially once eye candy features like anti-aliasing and anistotropic filtering are turned on. These visual quality features in particular can consume lots of memory bandwidth.

One last shot of Dusk

Look out, it's Vulcan!

Vulcan doesn't look to happy this morning

NVIDIA reduced the clock frequency of GeForce FX 5900 Ultra in an effort to improve manufacturing yields. At 500MHz for the Ultra model, NVIDIA was having a hard time finding chips that could run at that clock speed, and thus full scale production never commenced, many chips would have had to been thrown away, increasing production costs. With its slower 450MHz core, higher yields can be achieved, and thus NVIDIA can keep production costs in check.

NVIDIA has also added its UltraShadow technology for improved performance in games that utilize shadows extensively. When supported by the developer, UltraShadow reduces the workload on the graphics processor by preventing it from rendering regions of the shadow that are unnecessary. Think of it as occlusion culling, but for shadows exclusively.

Vulcan doing his Dusk impersonation

Is it just me or does Vulcan remind you of The Rock?

Pounding the ground

e-GeForce FX 5900 Ultra specs

For their e-GeForce FX 5900 Ultra card, eVGA has bumped the core clock frequency to 500MHz. Yes, you read that correctly, 500MHz! As a result, the e-GeForce FX 5900 Ultra matches the fill rate of GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, arguably the 5800's biggest highlight. On top of the higher core clock speed, eVGA boosts the memory clock frequency to 900MHz. This feature nets the e-GeForce FX 5900 Ultra an additional 1.6GB/sec of memory bandwidth.

Something tells me he could take Wolfman

Vulcan is worn out

With the clock speed improvements eVGA has made, the e-GeForce FX 5900 Ultra should be one of the faster GeForce FX 5900 Ultra cards on the market, if not the fastest. You’ll have to read on to see what kind of performance improvement the higher clock speeds bring.

High-End Graphics Feature Comparison
GPU	Core Clock (MHz)	Memory Clock (MHz)	Peak fill rate (Mpixels/sec)	Peak fill rate (Mtexels/sec)	Peak Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)	MSRP
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 256MB	450	850	1800	3600	27.2	$499
GeForce FX 5900 128MB	400	850	1600	3200	27.2	$399
e-GeForce FX 5900 Ultra	500	900	2000	4000	28.8	N/A
RADEON 9800 PRO	380	680	3040	3040	21.8	$399
RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB	380	700	3040	3040	22.4	$499
RADEON 9700 PRO	325	620	2600	2600	19.8	N/A