Final thoughts

After an absence of over eight months, NVIDIA has finally returned to the high-end segment with the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra. In fact, they’re not only back in the game, NVIDIA’s 256MB GeForce FX 5900 Ultra is the fastest graphics accelerator on the market, albeit with slightly lesser image quality than ATI’s RADEON 9800 PRO.

Lets look at the results, in real world game testing the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra finished on top in every benchmark except Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. This title in particular is clearly highly dependant on the graphics card’s fill-rate as evidenced by the older GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. With its 500MHz core clock, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra finished ahead of all other graphics cards in our testing with Splinter Cell.

The addition of the 256-bit memory interface in particular really allows the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra to shine in high-resolution environments with antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, one of GeForce FX 5800 Ultra’s weaknesses in comparison to the offerings from ATI.

NVIDIA also addressed the noise issue with GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. Rather than incorporating heat pipe technology similar to that found on the original FX Flow cooling system, NVIDIA opted to go instead with a traditional heatsink/fan combination. Describing the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra’s heatsink as “traditional” however is probably a bit conservative, as the heatsink is so large it physically consumes the PCI slot adjacent to your AGP slot! Fortunately the cooling fan NVIDIA has utilized is much quieter than its predecessor, so you won’t have to crank up the volume while you’re gaming.

The question now facing NVIDIA is availability. After their track record with GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, many will be skeptical of the June availability date. In talking with NVIDIA however, they sound very confident that they’ll be able to hit their June target. In a remarkable achievement, NVIDIA went to full production from NV35’s first silicon. As a result, NV35 has been in production since February and they claim to have shipped tens of thousands of NV35 cores to their launch partners by the time you’ve read this. For now though, we’re going to take a wait and see approach. After all, GeForce FX 5600 Ultra and 5200 Ultra’s are still hard to come by at retail, with the latter being built on TSMC’s proven 0.15-micron manufacturing process.

If everything we’re seeing today holds true, the 256MB GeForce FX 5900 Ultra will be a worthy competitor to ATI’s RADEON 9800 PRO, but at $500, its asking price will be too steep for many to afford. That’s why we really want to see what NVIDIA’s 128MB variants of the GeForce FX 5900 will be capable of. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to wait a little longer to get that answer, but in the meantime start saving your pennies because all of these cards come with pretty hefty price tags.