NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra: It's Here, but is it Good?

Quick Performance Intro (AA/AF Disabled) - Continued

The only other benchmark we ran with AA/AF disabled was Serious Sam 2: The Second Encounter (Demo) using the Little Trouble benchmark. As usual we used the Extreme Quality defaults but disabled Anisotropic Filtering (we'll be saving those benchmarks for a later section).

Serious Sam 2 AA/Aniso Disabled 1024x768x32 GeForce FX 5800 Ultra GeForce FX 5800 Radeon 9700 Pro Radeon 9700 160 148.2 146.6 139.2 | 0 | 32 | 64 | 96 | 128 | 160 | 192

Once again we see that the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra holds a small but reasonable (9%) performance advantage over the Radeon 9700 Pro.

Serious Sam 2 AA/Aniso Disabled Minimum FPS - 1024x768x32 GeForce FX 5800 Ultra Radeon 9700 Pro GeForce FX 5800 Radeon 9700 94.5 93.5 90.2 87.4 | 0 | 19 | 38 | 57 | 76 | 95 | 113

The minimum frame rate numbers are a bit more reliable under Serious Sam because we can report the sustained minimum frame rates, rather than the instantaneous minimums; thus these scores are much less prone to being thrown off by minor issues that would cause significant but short drops in frame rate.

Serious Sam 2 AA/Aniso Disabled 1280x960x32 GeForce FX 5800 Ultra Radeon 9700 Pro GeForce FX 5800 Radeon 9700 125.8 119.7 109.1 106.4 | 0 | 25 | 50 | 75 | 101 | 126 | 151

At higher resolutions the performance gap between the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra and the Radeon 9700 Pro is reduced instead of increased, in this case it is only 5%. This is a perfect case of ATI's raw memory bandwidth advantages outweighing any fill rate advantages that the GeForce FX has.

Serious Sam 2 AA/Aniso Disabled Minimum FPS - 1280x960x32 GeForce FX 5800 Ultra Radeon 9700 Pro Radeon 9700 GeForce FX 5800 83.5 81.3 76.1 70.1 | 0 | 17 | 33 | 50 | 67 | 84 | 100

The minimum frame rates continue to be very close...

Serious Sam 2 AA/Aniso Disabled 1600x1200x32 GeForce FX 5800 Ultra Radeon 9700 Pro Radeon 9700 GeForce FX 5800 88.4 87.4 76.5 76.3 | 0 | 18 | 35 | 53 | 71 | 88 | 11

Finally at 1600x1200 we see that virtually all performance advantage has been erased, as the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra is barely 1% faster than the Radeon 9700 Pro in this case.

Serious Sam 2 AA/Aniso Disabled Minimum FPS - 1600x1200x32 Radeon 9700 Pro GeForce FX 5800 Ultra Radeon 9700 GeForce FX 5800 61 60.9 56 54.5 | 0 | 12 | 24 | 37 | 49 | 61 | 73

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's really stress these cards by turning on some eye-candy...