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

AA+AF Performance - Q3A, Jedi Knight 2 & Comanche 4

For this next set of benchmarks we took three games that weren't GPU bound to begin with, and cranked up the resolution and AA/AF settings until we could see some differences between the ATI and NVIDIA offerings. We'll start out with a classic benchmark, Quake III Arena:

Quake 3 Arena 'four' AA/Aniso Performance 1600x1200x32 Radeon 9700 Pro (4X AA/8X Perf Aniso) Radeon 9700 Pro (4X AA/8X Qual Aniso) GeForce FX 5800 Ultra (4X AA/8X Bal Aniso) Radeon 9700 (4X AA/8X Perf Aniso) Radeon 9700 (4X AA/8X Qual Aniso) GeForce FX 5800 (4X AA/8X Bal Ansio) 114.3 104.8 102.2 98.4 90.2 83.3 | 0 | 23 | 46 | 69 | 91 | 114 | 137

If we weren't running at 1600x1200 with 4X AA and 8X Aniso enabled we'd be seeing frame rates well above 300fps, which is pretty ridiculous. Even in this benchmark we see that the Radeon 9700 Pro outperforms the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra by 11% at most.

Jedi Knight 2 AA/Aniso Performance 1600x1200x32 Radeon 9700 Pro (4X AA/8X Perf Aniso) Radeon 9700 Pro (4X AA/8X Qual Aniso) GeForce FX 5800 Ultra (4X AA/8X Bal Aniso) Radeon 9700 (4X AA/8X Perf Aniso) Radeon 9700 (4X AA/8X Qual Aniso) GeForce FX 5800 (4X AA/8X Bal Ansio) 113.9 111.6 99.9 99.7 95.7 82 | 0 | 23 | 46 | 68 | 91 | 114 | 137

Jedi Knight 2 is another Quake III Arena engine based game and it happens to be mostly CPU bound, but after turning up the resolution and enabling AA/Aniso we were able to put together a good benchmark with some great image quality. The performance is very similar to what we saw under Quake III Arena, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra still has some maturing to do before it can outperform the Radeon 9700 Pro. Let's hope, for NVIDIA's sake, that all it needs are some better drivers.

Comanche 4 Demo AA/Aniso Performance 1024x768x32 Radeon 9700 Pro (4X AA/8X Perf Aniso) GeForce FX 5800 Ultra (4X AA/8X Bal Aniso) Radeon 9700 (4X AA/8X Perf Aniso) GeForce FX 5800 (4X AA/8X Bal Ansio) Radeon 9700 Pro (4X AA/8X Qual Aniso) Radeon 9700 (4X AA/8X Qual Aniso) 50.1 49.7 45 44 40.8 35.7 | 0 | 10 | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 | 60

Finally, we end our real-world gaming tests with Comanche 4 - a very CPU bound flight simulator. The performance delta between the Radeon 9700 Pro and the GeForce FX is virtually nonexistent here, one of the very few cases we've seen.