NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra (Final) Review

GeForce FX 5600 Ultra is a quite a interesting GPU since certain improvements have been made to improve the performance further to gain an edge over the ATi Radeon 9600 Pro.

Introduction:

There has been a constant
performance tussle between NVIDIA and ATi in the
high Performance market segment and this time
round with their GeForce FX 5900 series (NV35) and
the Radeon 9800 Pro (R350) respectively. As we
know, ATi is coming out with their R360 in a
couple of month time to match up against the NV35
and we can expect a new series of performance
tussle again.

When a new core architecture is
designed, GPU makers will try to build different
cores surrounding the same architecture to fit
into different market segments. In the case of
NVIDIA, the GeForce FX 5600 series (NV31)
announced in March are meant to occupy the
Mainstream market segment and are built on the
strip-down NV30 architecture.



GeForce FX 5600 encompasses most of the nice
features of the NV30 core such as better
anisotropic filtering algorithm and fullscreen
anti-aliasing techniques with the support of frame
buffer compression technology

GeForce FX 5600
Ultra is a quite a interesting GPU since certain
improvements have been made to improve the
performance further to gain an edge over the ATi
Radeon 9600 Pro. NVIDIA has made improvements to
the core clock and memory clock from 350/350Mhz
previously to 400/400Mhz. GeForce FX 5600 series are meant
to replace the current GeForce 4 Titanium series
at a lower price point of US$ 199-250 for the Ultra
version and US$ 149-200 for the non-Ultra version.
GeForce FX 5200 series are meant to replace the
current GeForce 4 MX series for the Value segment
at a much lower price point of under US$ 100 for
both the Ultra version and non-Ultra version. One
of the most important feature of entire GeForce FX
family is the support of DirectX 9 architecture
with Pixel Shaders 2.0+ and Vertex Shaders 2.0+.

 

Specifications:

Process Technology	0.13 micron copper process (75M Transistors)
Package	FCBGA
AGP Interface	AGP 8x including Fast Writes and sideband addressing
Core Engine	256-bit GeForce FX 5600 Ultra (NV31)
Core Clock	400Mhz
Memory Type/Size	128/256MB GDDR
Memory Clock	800Mhz
Memory Bandwidth	12.8GB/s (128-bit)
RAMDAC	Dual integrated 400Mhz RAMDACs
Max Resolution	2048 X 1536 X 85Hz
Output Options	DVI-I Output / TV Output / VGA Output

 

Comparison
Chart

	GeForce FX 5600 Ultra	GeForce FX 5800	GeForce FX 5800 Ultra	GeForce FX 5900 Ultra
Micron Process	0.13	0.13	0.13	0.13
Core Clock	400Mhz	400Mhz	500Mhz	450Mhz
Memory Clock	800Mhz	800Mhz	1Ghz	850Mhz
Pixel Pipelines	4*1	4*2	4*2	4*2
Peak Pixel Fill Rate	1.6Gpixels/s	1.6Gpixels/s	2Gpixels/s	1.8Gpixels/s
Textures Units Per Pixel Pipeline	1	2	2	2
Peak Textures Fill Rate	1.6Gtexels/s	3.2Gtexels/s	4Gtexels/s	3.6Gtexels/s
Memory Interface	128-bit DDR	128-bit DDR II	128-bit DDR II	256-bit DDR
Peak Memory Bandwidth	12.8GB/s	12.8GB/s	16GB/s	27.2GB/s