Introduction

When NVIDIA introduced to the world their NV30-based GeForce FX 5800 Ultra card last year, many were very disappointed with its performance. It didn't meet our expectations at all. And when it was pitted against the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, the Radeon came out on top in majority of the tests done. The FX 5800 Ultra was also so hot that it required a massive cooling system - the FlowFX, which was very noisy.

At that point of time, Radeon 9700 became everyone's favourite. When ATI launched the its successor, the Radeon 9800 Pro, its astonishing performance slaughtered the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. Soon enough, NVIDIA cancelled production of the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra and announced the NV30's replacement - the NV35. The NV35 eventually became GeForce FX 5900 Ultra and this is the card we will be reviewing today.

Specifications Of The GeForce FX 5900 Ultra

• NVIDIA® GeForce™ FX 5900 Ultra GPU
• 0.13-micron Process
• 130 Million Transistors
• AGP 8X
• 256-bit Memory Interface
• 256MB DDR SDRAM
• 450MHz Core Clock
• 425MHz Memory Clock (850MHz DDR)
• 27.2GB/sec. memory bandwidth
• 400MHz Internal RAMDAC
• NVIDIA® CineFX™ 2.0 Architecture
• Microsoft® DirectX ® 9.0 with Vertex Shader 2.0+ and Pixel Shader 2.0+
• 16 Textures Per Pass
• NVIDIA® UltraShadow™ technology