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+.
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VR-Zone.com
Jun 5, 2003, 06:48 PM
