NVIDIA's Back with NV35 - GeForceFX 5900 Ultra

Quake III Arena

As we've mentioned in the past, the Quake III engine is still being used and thus performance using the engine shouldn't be ignored. For this reason we continue to use Quake III Arena as a benchmark, despite its insanely high performance results:

The GeForceFX 5900 Ultra does extremely well in Quake III Arena, to the point where it is CPU/platform bound at 1600x1200 with 4X AA/8X Anisotropic filtering enabled. Quake III is one situation where you could easily enable 6X or 8X AA settings without sacrificing playability, and it would be these rare situations where 256MB of memory would be necessary to deal with supporting such a large frame buffer.

Here we see a perfect example of the Intellisample HCT giving the NV35 core a serious performance advantage over the NV30.