NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra: It's Here, but is it Good?

The Drivers

NVIDIA supplied beta drivers to us that properly recognized the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra - v42.63. Other than an issue with enabling NVIDIA's 4XS AA mode (we'll discuss that later), we had no issues with the drivers on either our AMD or Intel test systems. After extensive testing however, it's clear that NVIDIA does have a good amount of optimization to work on before the GeForce FX is truly ready to compete with the likes of the Radeon 9700 Pro; you'll understand why as we take you through the performance tests.

The drivers have very similar control panels to what we're all familiar with, with a few new additions that are GeForce FX specific:

You can set 2D/3D clocks independently, we found it curious that NVIDIA set the 2D clocks so high

AA and Anisotropic Filtering settings are controlled in OpenGL and Direct3D by this single set of sliders:

The Performance - Balanced/Aggressive slider at the top controls the anisotropic filtering quality/performance settings. The Balanced setting offers higher image quality while the Aggressive setting offers greater performance.