Review: ASUS V9950 GeForce FX5900

We've noticed before in previous articles, especially the last one on the MSI, that Serious Sam 2 is very much like 3DMark 2001SE in terms of its render setup and how it pushes pixels through the driver and card, on to your screen.

Here's the base graph to start our proof.

The FX5900's are quicker than the Radeon's, but not by much. Memory bandwidth does the talking, SS2 scales pretty well with memory clocks at these settings. IQ now.

Radeon 9800 Pro, with a more efficient set of memory bandwidth optimisations like Z-buffer compression and colour data compression, does better than its R300 sibling, while the NV35's are quicker because, shockingly, they are quicker than other boards at stock clocks. Serious Sam 2 is a nice show off of NV35 here.

It's a deceiving graph, the Radeon's actually do better as we pump up the pixels, look.

More efficiency with the hardware as the pixel count goes through the roof, but more efficient applying IQ on the part of NV35 before that happens. It's swings and roundabouts if you hadn't cottoned on already, some games prefer the Radeon's, some prefer NV35, neither are slow. Our last benchmark now.