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

Quick Performance Intro (AA/AF Disabled)

Before we get into the truly strenuous benchmarks let's have a look at some scores without AA & Anisotropic Filtering enabled. First things first, synthetic benchmarks using 3DMark 2001:

3DMark 2001 SE helps confirm that NVIDIA is able to deliver as expected in terms of fill rate; with a much higher core clock (500MHz vs. 325MHz) it's no surprise that the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra comes away with a 37% higher fill rate in 3DMark than the Radeon 9700 Pro. What you have to take into account however is the fact that the Radeon 9700 Pro actually has more raw memory bandwidth than the GeForce FX (when you ignore the always-on color compression of the FX), which can significantly reduce any real-world fill rate advantage NVIDIA may have.

The rest of the 3DMark numbers are generally in favor of the GeForce FX but there are a few cases when the 5-month old Radeon 9700 Pro comes out on top. Let's move on to some real-world benchmarks before we conclude this quick performance intro and start focusing on why you'd really want to purchase one of these cards - for Anisotropic/AA performance.

Unreal Tournament 2003 AA/Aniso Disabled 1024x768x32 Radeon 9700 Pro GeForce FX 5800 Ultra GeForce FX 5800 Radeon 9700 205.4 204 198 189.2 | 0 | 41 | 82 | 123 | 164 | 205 | 246

What once used to be only true for video cards at 640x480 is now true for these power houses at 1024x768, being mostly CPU/driver limited that is. At 1024x768 we're not really stressing anything but what's very interesting and impressive on ATI's part is that the Radeon 9700 Pro is slightly faster than the GeForce FX. If you remember back to all previous ATI cards, in CPU/driver bound situations ATI was almost never on top. It always took turning on AA or cranking up the resolution in order to let ATI's bandwidth advantages (if they existed) to kick in and give them the performance advantage, but here we have ATI on top from the start. It just goes to show you how far along ATI's driver team has come and how mature the Radeon 9700 Pro is, considering that it has been shipping for close to 6 months now.

Unreal Tournament 2003 AA/Aniso Disabled Minimum FPS - 1024x768x32 Radeon 9700 Pro Radeon 9700 GeForce FX 5800 Ultra GeForce FX 5800 105 84.1 73.7 71.6 | 0 | 21 | 42 | 63 | 84 | 105 | 126

Due to popular demand we've included graphs of minimum frame rates as well as average frame rates in situations where the benchmark reports the data to us. Here we see that the GeForce FX, for whatever reason, has much lower minimum frame rates than the Radeon 9700 Pro. We have no explanation for this other than we hope it is an issue with the current GeForce FX drivers.

Unreal Tournament 2003 AA/Aniso Disabled 1280x960x32 GeForce FX 5800 Ultra Radeon 9700 Pro GeForce FX 5800 Radeon 9700 181.2 160.2 160.2 138.6 | 0 | 36 | 72 | 109 | 145 | 181 | 217

As we increase the resolution the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra actually begins to pull away from the Radeon 9700 Pro, here establishing a 13% performance advantage. But now let's have a look at the minimum frame rates:

Unreal Tournament 2003 AA/Aniso Disabled Minimum FPS - 1280x960x32 Radeon 9700 Pro Radeon 9700 GeForce FX 5800 GeForce FX 5800 Ultra 96.3 83.8 69.9 65.2 | 0 | 19 | 39 | 58 | 77 | 96 | 116

Once again we see that while the average frame rates are quite high, the GeForce FX 5800 falls far behind even the regular Radeon 9700 in the lowest frame rates attained during the course of the benchmark.

Unreal Tournament 2003 AA/Aniso Disabled 1600x1200x32 GeForce FX 5800 Ultra GeForce FX 5800 Radeon 9700 Pro Radeon 9700 132.5 110.3 108.6 93.3 | 0 | 27 | 53 | 80 | 106 | 133 | 159

At 1600x1200 even the regular GeForce FX 5800 is able to outperform the Radeon 9700 Pro in average frame rate numbers, but once the attention shifts to the minimum frame rates...

Unreal Tournament 2003 AA/Aniso Disabled Minimum FPS - 1600x1200x32 Radeon 9700 Pro GeForce FX 5800 Ultra GeForce FX 5800 Radeon 9700 66.1 60.2 59.5 56.6 | 0 | 13 | 26 | 40 | 53 | 66 | 79

The GeForce FX doesn't do nearly as bad in comparison to the Radeon 9700 Pro here, as the minimum frame rates are relatively similar across the board at this high of a resolution. It's nice to note that all of these cards can provide minimum frame rates at around the 60 fps mark at 1600 x 1200.