Review: MSI GeForce FX5900

Base first. It's pretty GPU limited, so look out for FX 5900 to do well.

A funny graph really, ignore the FX winning for the time being.

There we go, the seperation from midrange to high end setups shows its face. The Radeon boards make more of this render setup than the FX does. It's shader heavy so NV35 can keep touch, but it's one of those tests where it's in sub-optimal mode doing the final render so it drops off compared to the beefier Radeon's which run in 8x1 all the time.

Pump up the pixels baby!

More of the same. Thing of Comanche 4 as a 3DMark 2001SE style test, with a few more shaders and more GPU limiting in behaviour. The PD graph for the final shakeout.

Watch 9800 Pro show off. Ah, much of a muchness. The 2 big ATI's are more efficient in this kind of test when IQ is enabled, they'll scale better with increased clock speeds compared to the FX, which sits somewhere in between in terms of final frames per second.

You can see NVIDIA's Quality Intellisample mode hurt their boards a lot more compared to ATI's method of selective filtering, explaining the bix pixel test's dropoff when there's not enough memory bandwidth spare. The mother of all card killers next and our penultimate test.