Conclusion

Well, after some fairly exhaustive testing we can begin to paint a slightly clear light on GeForce FX 5800 Ultra's performance. As we can see it fairs very favourably against NVIDIA's previous generation. In normal rendering modes the 5800, most of the time, has a relatively good performance gain over GeForce 4 Ti 4600, and it has some very good performance gains when FSAA is utilised. Anisotropic Filtering is a slightly different matter though, it does appear that the 'Application' mode, that is basically the equivalent of GeForce4's mode performs a little above what the pure fill-rate and bandwidth difference would account for on GeForce FX, but not to a significant degree. The other modes of Anisotropic Filtering are billed as more 'adaptive' techniques, but they seem to just be lowering the levels of filtering occurring and dropping Trilinear filtering back closer to Bilinear filtering. During our conversation with NVIDIA's Geoff Ballew at the GeForce FX Launch in London he mentioned that GeForce FX's HSR routines were capable of rejecting more pixels than GeForce 4, however our testing seems to indicate there is no significant performance difference here - perhaps something that will be tuned in later driver releases?

One area that does look very promising right now is the area of DX8 shader speed. If the 3DMark2001SE Pixel Shader score speeds are anything to go by then it does seem that GeForce FX has more integer shader calculating abilities than its predecessor. However, the big area that this is being sold on is its performance, features and flexibilities in its extended shader support, and this preview was not able to address that in any significant fashion -- watch out for some continued testing with the GeForce FX at Beyond3D.

While the GeForce FX appears to offer a very nice performance increase over GeForce4 it's still got some question marks against it. The rather rocky picture painted at the start of this preview appears to carry on even as we speak, what with constant talk that the product will only be available in very limited numbers and yield issues being the cause. With NVIDIA's management saying the products are on allocation, we don't really know where this stands at the moment - even the rumour mill for the refresh product has started already, and not just from the normal rumour mill sources! And of course, on this occasion, NVIDIA isn't operating in a competition vacuum.

Update:

Our GeForce FX preview raised a number of questions during testing. We put these questions to NVIDIA and Tony Tamasi took some time out to reply. Read on to find out more. . . 

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