Conclusion:
Going into this review I was very excited about the surprises Nvidia may have in store for us. There have been many rumours about what the specifics of the NV36 would be, how Nvidia would change X or Y to improve performance over the 5600 Ultra (NV31), and even take the performance crown back from ATI’s 9600 series.

On paper, excluding the 128bit memory bus the card looks like it should perform well, the core and memory speeds are sufficiently fast and therefore there is reasonable bandwidth provided. The card itself looks basic, no complaints there – it is a reference design after all and the lighter cooling solution over the FX5900 is a good improvement. Nvidia’s partners should be able to further improve the design.

Despite the apparent raw speed from the specifications however I can’t help but think back to a conversation I had with a member of the graphics card industry recently, the comment that sticks in my mind was that as we advance in the industry memory bandwidth is becoming less important. The most important factor now is the core of the card and how well it performs in processing items like shaders. From our tests it is clear to see this is becoming more and more the case and the Radeon provides a far more efficient architecture for today’s and tomorrows titles. The FX 5700 Ultra is fast, no doubting that, and it is a huge improvement over the 5600 series, it has excellent OpenGL performance and in the most used benchmarks such as 3dMark01/03 and Unreal Tournament 2003 it even gives the 9600 XT some good competition, when not using AA/AF. If the conclusion/review stopped here we would be very satisfied with the card, unfortunately we have the issue of AA/AF performance on the 5700 Ultra. When we enable this the card just can’t keep up with the Radeon 9600 XT, UT2003 is an excellent example. The cards are almost frame for frame in 0xAA 0xAF but 2xAA and 2xAF creates a gulf in performance, this is something Nvidia need to address, if they can, and fast. End users who are spending between £150 and £200 on a card nowadays expect to be able to use AA/AF. Additionally they expect to be able to play the latest games at reasonable speeds, any 5700 Ultra user wanting to buy TRAOD would be sorely disappointed gaming would be choppy, even at 1024x768.

So who should consider this card as an upgrade? Put up against the 9600 XT I just can’t recommend anyone to buy the 5700 Ultra. It’s clear that Nvidia can squeeze performance out of the card…3DMark shows that. However people buy cards to play games and there is no way Nvidia can optimise their FX range for performance in every game that is released. Nothing emphasises the situation FX users are going to be in more often than not than Max Payne 2, a game that is a week old and which no manufacturer has had time to optimise for, there really is no competition in the performance here.

It saddens me to say that for another cycle Nvidia don’t have a card to compete with the market leader in the mainstream area. And that is not good for the industry.