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ASUS V9950 Ultra Review July 31, 2003 Brandon Bell |
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Summary: Based on NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5900 Ultra GPU, the ASUS V9950 Ultra is targeted for high-end enthusiasts and gamers. Unlike other GeForce FX 5900 Ultra cards however, the V9950 Ultra is a single-slot design! Sounds great for SFF users, but how does this unique cooler (and card) perform? Find out, as we explore the performance of this card with NVIDIA's Detonator 44.71 driver. We also take a closer look at the issues surrounding GeForce FX 5900 Ultra and UT2K3!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 15 ) |
Up to now, the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra card market has been fairly tame. Cards from third-party manufacturers have all been based on the same NVIDIA reference design; in fact, NVIDIA has handled all board production in house. The end result is that consumers have been purchasing the exact same hardware regardless of the card manufacturer chosen.
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Because of this, early board manufacturers have split into three camps. You’ve got eVGA all alone offering their e-GeForce FX 5900 Ultra at higher clock speeds than the rest (500MHz core/900MHz memory). This gives them a performance advantage over other GeForce FX 5900 Ultra manufacturers that has so far gone unchallenged. The second camp has used its software bundle to gain an advantage over others. This group includes Gainward and MSI, who has an over-the-top software bundle with their FX5900-VTD256. The final group is about as no-frills as it gets, these guys include the card and its accessories in the packaging, but no game bundle. This camp consists of the three-letter companies, BFG and PNY, who are currently locked in a battle with each other at retail.
Complicating matters have been the early reports of some cards with flickering issues and/or a mysterious squealing noise coming directly from the card itself, an issue we witnessed firsthand with the MSI FX5900-TD128. Clearly things have not come easily for board manufacturers up to this point.
As one of NVIDIA’s oldest board partners, with products dating all the way back to the original RIVA 128, we had no doubt that ASUS would be offering a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra card, the question was just a matter of timing. It turns out that while other card manufacturers were busy bringing their first generation GeForce FX 5900 Ultra cards to market, ASUS has been playing it more conservatively, quietly working on their own card that wasn’t manufactured completely by NVIDIA.
To be honest, this probably shouldn’t come as a surprise if you’re familiar with ASUS’ previous graphics offerings. Their V8460 Deluxe was one of the first second generation GeForce4 Ti 4600 cards with video input support, and if you read our V9280S review last Winter, you certainly saw how impressed we were with this third generation GeForce4 Ti 4200 offering. Not only had ASUS integrated a Ti 4200 core on a Ti 4600 printed circuit board (with accompanying BGA memory), they also bumped the core clock to 275MHz and outfitted the board with 128MB of 600MHz memory.
The end result was a Ti 4200 card that outperformed the more expensive GeForce4 Ti4400, plus it offered built-in video editing as an added bonus! It’s no small wonder why this card was easily awarded our Editor’s Choice Award; ASUS had really upped the bar with the V9280S’s release.
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Now ASUS is out again to stir things up, this time in the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra market. For the V9950 Ultra they’re representing with a 5900 Ultra board that doesn’t consume the PCI slot adjacent to your AGP card!
SIDEBAR: ASUS V9950 Ultra Product Webpage
| Card details | Page:: ( 2 / 15 ) |
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra
At the heart of the ASUS V9950 Ultra is NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5900 Ultra GPU. This graphics core, originally codenamed NV35 is NVIDIA’s follow-up to the unsuccessful GeForce FX 5800/5800 Ultra that was discontinued earlier this year.
The biggest addition in GeForce FX 5900 Ultra is its new 256-bit memory interface, twice the width of GeForce FX 5800 and matching ATI’s RADEON 9800 family. By moving to a wider memory interface, memory bandwidth is increased (assuming clock speeds remain equal). Memory bandwidth becomes increasingly important as you increase the screen resolution and/or turn on visual quality features such as anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. If you recall the original GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, it was largely able to keep up with RADEON 9700 PRO when these features were disabled. But once you cranked up the AA and AF, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra quickly fell behind.
With its 850MHz memory, the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra boasts up to 27.2GB/sec of peak memory bandwidth, nearly twice the amount of its predecessor, and 4.8GB/sec greater than the 256MB RADEON 9800 PRO. GeForce FX 5900 Ultra also has a fill-rate advantage over RADEON 9800 PRO, 3.6Gigatexels/sec versus just over 3Gigatexels/sec in the ATI card. But as we all know, performance in the real-world can differ drastically from paper specs. In our own testing we’ve found that both cards win their fair share of benchmarks.
Other than the new memory interface, the only other significant addition is NVIDIA’s UltraShadow technology. UltraShadow is designed to prevent the GeForce FX 5900 GPU from rendering regions of shadows that aren’t visible to the end user; this reduces the workload of the graphics processor, ultimately increasing performance (especially in scenes that are composed of an extensive amount of shadows). id Software’s Doom 3 will be the first title that we’re aware of that will take advantage of this feature.
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The V9950 Ultra card
Upon first inspection, you can easily see the differences between the ASUS V9950 Ultra and the reference boards we’ve received from other GeForce FX 5900 Ultra manufacturers. For starters, ASUS uses an aqua blue PCB for the V9950 Ultra, rather than the green PCB NVIDIA uses on its GeForce FX 5900 Ultra boards. When combined with the gold colored backplate and copper heatsink that adorns the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra core and memory, the V9950 Ultra card has a very distinctive look.
The heatsink itself is a one-piece design, with another large heatsink mounted on the underside of the card, cooling the memory modules located there. NVIDIA’s reference boards utilize a two-piece design on the top of the card; one heatsink cools the GPU while a separate plate (with fins) cools the memory. Rather than isolating the components as NVIDIA does, ASUS’ design cools both components simultaneously. On one hand this is good, as it increases the surface area the heatsink has to work with, but on the other hand, if the GPU begins to get especially hot, the heat will affect the memory modules as well.
To combat this, ASUS has elected to use copper rather than aluminum due to its superior thermal conductivity characteristics. ASUS also differs from NVIDIA by using two low RPM fans, rather than one fan to cool the GPU.
As we mentioned previously, the heatsink on the top of the card is slim enough to fit without taking a PCI slot like NVIDIA’s reference design. This allows the V9950 Ultra to fit inside small form factor systems like those you see from Shuttle.
SIDEBAR: ASUS also manufactures a GeForce FX 5900 card, the V9950.
| Board analysis (cont’d) | Page:: ( 3 / 15 ) |
Whenever you see a video card with two fans, it’s only natural to be concerned about the noise level it generates. Fortunately we can report that noise isn’t an issue with the ASUS V9950 Ultra, in our testing the card actually operated quieter than NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5900 Ultra reference card.
Rather than use one blower style fan like that used by NVIDIA, ASUS has implemented two conventional fans that spin at lower RPMs. This dual fan cooling approach is fairly popular among GeForce FX 5900 cards; the V9950 Ultra is the first GeForce FX 5900 Ultra card to employ this that we’ve encountered. In fact, ASUS has implemented the same cooler on its GeForce FX 5900 card, the ASUS V9950.
In operation, we witnessed temperatures as high as 63 degrees Celsius; this is quite a bit warmer than other GeForce FX 5900 Ultra cards we’ve tested. We feel that this is likely due to the fan’s operation. Unlike other GeForce FX 5900 Ultra cards that spin up once a 3D application is launched, the V9950 Ultra fans appear to rotate at the same speed. Even while we were running tests with the V9950 Ultra overclocked, the fans never cranked up to higher RPMs. If the fans were to adjust their speed with GPU temperature, core temperature would be easier to keep in check. Hopefully this is an issue that can be resolved in software.
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As far as the rest of the board is concerned, the V9950 Ultra is essentially another GeForce FX 5900 Ultra reference design. Component placement is the same; the only difference is that the V9950 Ultra board is produced by ASUS rather than NVIDIA. From a features perspective however, the V9950 Ultra does have one significant change: ASUS has elected not to use the Philips SAA7108AE video encoder chip present on the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra cards produced by NVIDIA. This should help lower production costs for ASUS, but it remains to be seen if V9950 Ultra prices will be lower than other GeForce FX 5900 Ultra cards.
Software
Rounding out the package are full versions of Gun Metal, Black Hawk Down, and Battle Engine Aquila. ASUS also includes its DVD playback software and a 6-in-1 CD of game demos (consisting of Splinter Cell, Warcraft III, Big Mutha Truckers, BREED, Colin McRae 3, and TOCA Race Driver.)
One piece of software that merits special attention is ASUS’ GameFace technology. GameFace merges the world of videoconferencing with PC gaming. As a result, you can see and hear your opponent as you play against him. We can see this feature coming in handy as well for clans or cooperative play in a game like Serious Sam, but its biggest weakness will be that your opponent or partner will also need a GameFace-enabled ASUS video card. With only two cards currently enabled with this feature (the V9950 and V9950 Ultra) the pool of potential gamers is pretty limited.
SIDEBAR: We also tested with Detonator 44.03 and found that the V9950 fans didn’t spin up with that driver either
| Texturing with UT2K3 | Page:: ( 4 / 15 ) |
One area that we’d like to address concerns Unreal Tournament 2003. The current controversy surrounding Unreal Tournament 2003 started shortly after posting our Unreal Tournament performance article last month.
Dave Baumann of Beyond3D discovered that GeForce FX cards render a form of quasi trilinear filtering, even with the driver running in quality mode. This is important because by using a mix of bilinear and trilinear, performance is enhanced. When you factor in the significance of Unreal Tournament 2003 not just as a game, but as a performance benchmark used by numerous publications, quite a few people became concerned about the legitimacy of testing results taken on this website as well as countless others.
To get to the heart of the matter, we loaded up Unreal Tournament 2003 and went straight to the map our custom demo (T2) we use for all of our testing is based on, DM-Insidious. ATI’s RADEON 9800 PRO with CATALYST 3.6 was used to represent the ATI platform, while the ASUS V9950 Ultra with Detonator 44.71 (the driver that shipped with the video card) was used to represent GeForce FX.
First, we cranked up the anisotropic filtering setting on both cards to 8x via their respective control panels (both cards were running in their quality mode). This is the method we use to adjust image quality for all of our performance testing in Unreal Tournament 2003. Lets look at the RADEON 9800 PRO first:
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Now the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra:
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As you can see, neither card is truly using trilinear filtering. The transitions between mipmap levels are harsh. If trilinear filtering were in use, the colors (each color represents a mipmap level) would blend together more naturally.
Normally when lesser filtering methods are used, the lower quality mipmap levels stand out pretty dramatically; sometimes causing a shimmering effect to the eye. However, we can see here that with ATI and NVIDIA’s bilinear/trilinear mix, this isn’t the case. The higher detail textures that are closer to the end user blend fairly well with the textures they’re directly adjacent to, and the shimmering effect is not apparent during movement.
This is where the controversy begins. Both companies are giving end users a good-looking image (in our subjective opinion) that does sacrifice some texture quality, but yields better performance. NVIDIA did however tell reviewers that its Quality mode in the Detonator drivers would always display trilinear filtering a case which we don’t see here. But wait, there’s an “Application” setting in 44.71! Let’s try running both cards in their respective application modes starting with ATI:
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Now NVIDIA:
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As you can see, when application mode is forced on the ATI driver, it does what it’s told and renders an image with trilinear filtering in place. On the other hand, the NVIDIA card continues to use its quasi-trilinear mode, albeit with higher image quality.
This is where the controversy really heats up, as the ATI card submits to the desires of the end user, rendering the image as the developer intended, while GeForce FX always forces NVIDIA’s quasi-trilinear mode on its user (in NVIDIA’s defense, we’ve been told that they did have Epic’s approval for this optimization). For the consumer who wants all the eye candy turned on when he sets it in the driver, GeForce FX currently has, for lack of a better word, selective memory, while ATI’s RADEON line gives the end user what he wants. With today’s $400+ video cards all offering more than enough performance for today’s latest games, eye candy is becoming a more important factor than before.
Fortunately, there is light at the end of the tunnel for NVIDIA users. NVIDIA is currently hard at work on a driver that will resolve this issue. This provides little solace for current image quality enthusiasts with GeForce FX cards, but it does appear as if NVIDIA has seen the error in its ways.
SIDEBAR: ASUS also manufactures video cards with video input support under the VideoSuite brand.
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 5 / 15 ) |
System Setup
AMD Athlon XP 3200+
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe Revision 2
512MB OCZ EL PC3200 (DDR400) SDRAM
ATI RADEON 9800 PRO – 256MB
ATI RADEON 9800 PRO – 128MB
Driver version CATALYST 3.6
eVGA e-GeForce FX 5900 Ultra
ASUS V9950 Ultra
MSI GeForce FX5900-TD128
Driver version Detonator FX (44.71)
30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive
Windows XP Professional
DirectX 9.0
Benchmarks
Nascar Racing 2003 Season (Bristol custom demo)
Quake III: Arena version 1.32 (fscrusher demo)
Unreal Tournament 2003 (t2 custom demo)
IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles (The Black Death track)
Splinter Cell (FS custom demo)
SIDEBAR: ASUS is the world’s largest motherboard manufacturer.
| NASCAR Racing 2003 Season | Page:: ( 6 / 15 ) |
Nascar 2003
SIDEBAR: With Indy Car Racing pushed back to later this year, we’ve been thinking about incorporating Rallisport Racing Challenge.
| IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles | Page:: ( 7 / 15 ) |
IL-2 Sturmovik: FB
SIDEBAR: Forgotten Battles features pixel shaded water among its list of new features.
| Quake III | Page:: ( 8 / 15 ) |
Quake III - OpenGL
SIDEBAR: For Quake 3, we run high quality settings, then set the texture quality to maximum and geometric detail to high.
| Unreal Tournament 2003 | Page:: ( 9 / 15 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003 – Direct3D
SIDEBAR: UT2003 is run with highest quality detail settings except for decals.
| Splinter Cell | Page:: ( 10 / 15 ) |
Splinter Cell – Direct3D
SIDEBAR: Remember, AA doesn’t work properly in Splinter Cell. NVIDIA cards auto-detect Splinter Cell and disable it, ATI cards don’t.
| IL2:FB 4xAA, 8xAF | Page:: ( 11 / 15 ) |
IL-2 Sturmovik: FB
SIDEBAR: We’re also considering adding Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004.
| UT 2003 4xAA 8xAF | Page:: ( 12 / 15 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003
SIDEBAR: ASUS also makes a line of TV tuner cards.
| Overclocking | Page:: ( 13 / 15 ) |
Quake 3
Unreal Tournament 2003
SIDEBAR: We used NVIDIA’s Coolbits utility to overclock the V9950 Ultra. We were actually able to hit memory speeds as high as 1.01GHz, but we ran into too many artifacts.
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 14 / 15 ) |
Pros
Performance: NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5900 Ultra GPU is no slouch when it comes to performance. With the highest core clock frequency in the industry, the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra GPU boasts a fill rate of 3.6Gigatexel/second thanks to its 4x2 architecture, and its 256-bit memory architecture is equally impressive.
With all this horsepower, gamers can crank up the screen resolution and turn on image quality features such as anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing without suffering unacceptable performance. GeForce FX 5900 Ultra is also designed for next generation DirectX 9 games like Half-Life 2.
Cooling: ASUS’ unique copper cooling system does not consume the PCI slot next to the AGP slot on your motherboard, and is slim enough to fit inside small form factor systems, making the V9950 Ultra the perfect GeForce FX 5900 Ultra card for these applications. In addition, the dual fan design is remarkably quiet, ASUS claims noise levels of less than 30 decibels, and based on what we witnessed, we believe it.
With graphics cards generating increasing levels of heat, it’s refreshing to see board manufacturers such as ASUS come up with clever ways to combat this enemy. However, we would like to see the fans on the V9950 Ultra operate dynamically like they do on other GeForce FX 5900 Ultra cards, if the fans would pick up the pace once 3D applications are launched, we have a feeling that the V9950 Ultra would operate at lower temperature levels than it is currently.
GameFace: It will be interesting to see how ASUS’ GameFace technology fares. With online gaming becoming more popular, obviously the ability to directly communicate with the people you’re playing with or against will be welcomed, but is GameFace the future of communication in online gaming? Microsoft’s SideWinder Game Voice never really took off, and similar programs like Roger Wilco have never escaped the niche market they currently reside in. With Valve currently offering built-in voice communication in games such as Counter-Strike, GameVoice probably won’t be used by many of these gamers, which happen to be the same consumers who are early adopters and seek out features like GameFace. The proprietary nature of GameFace will also close some doors for it.
If you do happen to have a friend with an ASUS graphics card that supports GameFace however, you can have some really exciting co-op and deathmatch gaming experiences in store for you.
Cons
Price: Without video input support, ASUS should have a cost advantage over other GeForce FX 5900 Ultra manufacturers utilizing NVIDIA’s reference design. But still, $400+ is a lot to pay for a graphics card.
SIDEBAR: ASUS also makes a line of PDAs.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 15 / 15 ) |