Review: MSI GeForce FX5900

Quake3 is an old test. DirectX 6 class (despite being an OpenGL game, its rendering method is broadly equivalent to a mid-point between DX5 and DX7 style games), it's more a test of system bandwidth these days. Until we turn on IQ that is. Here's a pretty unrepresentative base, don't read too much in to it.

Yikes, lots of frames per second. But even the slowest card is mighty fast here, so lets make it harder for them.

Yikes, a near 50% drop off for the MSI, with rather less of a hit for 9800 Pro and 9700 Pro. But, there's a context to these benchmarks, let's move on to the 3rd version of the test.

We can see the midrange cards choke to death, while the high end boards cope a lot better. Here's the PD graph to make sense of it all.

In this test, FX 5900 benchmarks like a FX 5600 Ultra with monster clocks. You can see the pattern of the drops matching up on both the NVIDIA boards, while the movements in the ATI boards (at the high end at least) are similar too. We can definitely tell that in our DX6 class benchmark, the MSI isn't quite operating at full efficiency in terms of what's under the hood. We knew that would happen, we talked about it on page 2, and here's our very graphic proof.

It's a balance, would you really use any of the 3 high end boards to primarily play a class of game like Quake 3?

Something to think about as we pick another game to fiddle with. How about Serious Sam 2?