GeForce FX 5900 Features

256-bit Memory Interface

The NV30's 128-bit memory interface had been identified as one of the major reasons why the NV30 performed so poorly. With the NV35, NVIDIA widened the memory bus to 256-bit, which is twice as wide as that of the NV30. And instead of using DDR2 memory, NVIDIA switched back to standard DDR memory as the latter dissipated less heat than the former.

With DDR memory running at 425MHz, the GeForceFX 5900 Ultra is now able to achieve a whopping 27.2GB/s of theoretical memory bandwidth! That is 70% more memory bandwidth than seen in the GeforceFX 5800 Ultra. This should improve the overall FSAA performance of the card.

Intellisample HCT

Intellisample HCT is NVIDIA’s latest compression technology designed to deliver the highest quality antialiasing visual at high resolution . HCT stands for High-resolution Compression Technology.

As the name suggests, Intellisample HCT compresses the graphics data before sending them to the memory; to increase the memory bandwidth efficiency. Previous versions of Intellisample technology featured a 4:1 lossless compression ratio. This means there won't be any loss of color information or reduction in image quality. While the lossless compression ratio still remains 4:1 with the new Intellisample HCT, NVIDIA claims to have improved its efficiency by 50%!

CineFX 2.0

The NV35's programmable shader technology is based on the CineFX 2.0 architecture. The CineFX 2.0 itself was based on the first generation CineFX engine, albeit with a 2X performance increase in floating-point shader calculation and a brand new feature designed to accelerate shadows volume - the UltraShadow technology.

UltraShadow

One of the major advances of NV35 - the UltraShadow technology was designed to accelerate shadows. With UltraShadow, the developer is allowed to specify shadows that can be seen and those that cannot be seen in a particular scene. This gives the developer the ability to accelerate shadow calculation by eliminating unnecessary calculation of shadows which won't be visible.