Nvidia FX5700 Ultra P/Review - PAGE 1

Introduction

Over the last year or so, nVidia has been hit by a lot of controversy regarding their video card performance as well as their well-documented driver 'optimizations'. The GeForce FX 5600 non-Ultra and Ultra was met by many mediocre reviews, as the performance without Anti-Aliasing and anisotropic filtering was lower than the GeForce 4 Ti series in many cases. Only when these features were turned on was the performance any higher (to be fair, this was due to the GeForce 4 Ti's inability to handle AA and AF efficiently).

The new GeForce FX 5700 Ultra (which was rumored to be delayed from last week to Monday - not that it made much difference) is part of nVidia's fall refresh, and is supposed to replace the FX5600 Ultra as their mainstream part as well as competing against the recently released Radeon 9600 XT.

Speaking of the Radeon 9600 XT, we have a reference board from ATi, so we actually have some head to head benchmarks for you later. Unlike the GeForce FX 5600 line, which was beat badly by the Radeon 9600 Pro, the GeForce FX 5700 holds it own with the Radeon 9600 XT!

Check out the specs of the FX5700 compared to its slightly higher and lower family members: