NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra: It's Here, but is it Good?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 27, 2003 3:50 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
AA+AF Performance
To test these cards the way they were meant to be used we used the settings we discovered would be the best for each solution. For the GeForce FX we ran with the following settings enabled:
- 8X Performance - Balanced Anisotropic Filtering
- 4X Anti-Aliasing
The Radeon 9700 Pro was run with the following enabled:
- 8X Performance Anisotropic Filtering
- 4X Anti-Aliasing
For comparison purposes we also threw in a Radeon 9700 Pro with 8X Quality Anisotropic Filtering enabled for image quality purists, but we think that the performance setting is the best option for Radeon 9700 Pro owners and prefer its tremendous performance advantage over the slight reduction in image quality. The comparison you'll want to make is between the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra (4X AA/8X Bal Aniso) and the Radeon 9700 Pro (4X AA/8X Perf Aniso).
As usual, we'll start with performance under Unreal Tournament 2003:
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130.3
108.6Thanks to ATI's higher performing anisotropic filtering settings, the Radeon 9700 Pro is able to outperform the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra by a massive 20% in this test.
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62.9
59.4The minimum frame rates remain in line with what we saw in the average frame rate numbers; the gap between the GeForce FX and the Radeon 9700 Pro isn't nearly as large as what we saw in the AA/Aniso disabled tests because of the fact that enabling these two features increases the stress level so tremendously on these cards and thus brings down the minimum frame rates across the board.
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As the resolution increases the performance delta between the Radeon 9700 Pro (4X AA/8X Perf Aniso) and the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra remains around 20%. Once again we see that this delta can be attributed primarily to NVIDIA's 8X Balanced Anisotropic filtering setting, had their Aggressive setting offered a higher level of image quality the FX would have definitely been on top of the competition but you can't argue with the visual evidence we provided earlier.
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Even with 4X AA and 8X Anisotropic Filtering enabled, the Radeon 9700 Pro can still manage to pull a minimum of 52.5 fps in this test at 1280x960, which isn't bad at all. It's interesting to see that it has taken this long (remember the introduction of FSAA with the Voodoo4/5 almost 4 years ago?) for features like anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering to be things you can turn on in virtually any situation because of the power of these GPUs.
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At 1600x1200 the performance delta grows considerably; even if we were to compare to the Radeon 9700 Pro with 4X AA and 8X Quality Anisotropic Filtering enabled, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra is still not able to come out on top.
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