GeForce FX 5900 XT?
FX 5900 XT?To both the enthusiast and uninitiated, the sheer number of cards, numbers, models, and supposed special editions can be bewildering. The various FX 5900 XTs will encroach on the incumbent FX 5700 Ultra, FX 5700 and, to some extent, ATI's Radeon 9600XT's pricing and positioning. Depending upon which board partner's card you plump for, pricing can range from £100 - £150, with the FX 5900 XT at the higher end of the scale. What, then, makes it a better card than the reasonable FX 5700 Ultra?. Let's find out with the aid of a handy table.
| PowerColor ATI Radeon 9600XT Bravo | NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra | AOpen GeForce FX 5900XT | ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB | |
| GPU | RV360 | NV36 | NV35 | R350 |
| Transistor count | ~75m | ~80m | ~80m | ~110m |
| Manufacturing process (micron) | 0.13 | 0.13 | 0.13 | 0.15 |
| Pixel pipelines | 4 | 4 | 4/8* | 8 |
| Memory bus width | 128-bit DDR | 128-bit DDR | 256-bit DDR | 256-bit DDR |
| Texturing units per pipe | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 |
| Core clock | 500MHz | 475MHz | 390MHz | 380MHz |
| Memory clock | 675MHz | 906MHz | 700MHz | 700MHz |
| Pixel fillrate | 2000 Mpixels /sec. | 1600 Mpixels / sec. | 1560 Mpixels / sec. | 3040 Mpixels/s |
| Texture fillrate | 2000 Mtexels /sec. | 1600 Mtexels / sec. | 3120 Mtexels / sec. | 3040 Mtexels / sec. |
| Memory bandwidth | ~10.8GB/s | ~14.4GB/s | ~22.4GB/s | ~22.4GB/s |
| RAMDACs | 2 x 400MHz | 2 x 400MHz | 2 x 400MHz | 2 x 400MHz |
| Expected cost | £120 | £130 | £150 | £175 - £250 |
| Other features | VIVO | 256-bit memory bus, 4/8 rendering | 256MB RAM |
* - the NV35 behaves like a 4-pipe setup for most operations.
The biggest differences, with respect to performance, is the use of a 256-bit wide memory bus. So whilst the AOpen Aeolus runs onboard RAM at over 200MHz slower than an FX 5700 Ultra's, the double-width bus more than makes up for the apparent shortfall. In short, there's no compelling reason why the FX 5900 XT won't be faster than the FX 5700 Ultra when testing in bandwidth-limited scenarios. The slower core speed can also be partially offset by the FX 5900 XT's strange rendering setup. On paper, the FX 5900 XT kind of makes the FX 5700 Ultra redundant, doesn't it?. We'll try and put some proof behind that assertion. 3DMark 03's fillrate and shader tests were run at 1024x768x32.
As the GeForce FX 5900 XT behaves like a 4-pipe design for the most part, we're not surprised by its single-texturing results, which fall way behind the strictly 8-pipe Radeon 9800 Pro's.
Add in a second texturing unit, though, and the AOpen card does extremely well, according to 3DMark03.
Pixel shader performance is good by NVIDIA standards, but barely adequate by ATI's.
Vertex shading performance is merely average. We can surmise that the FX 5900 XT has excellent bandwidth and multi-texturing performance, but it may lack in shader-heavy games.
