Conclusion

Driver distractions aside, the actual performances of the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra appear to be a slightly mixed bag when comparing them to its predecessor.

The normal rendering game performance is more or less split between the 5900 and 5800 Ultra's, with some going the way of the 5900 Ultra and others feeling 5900 Ultra's 50MHz deficit and the performance going to the 5800 Ultra. When Anisotropic filtering is applied the 5800 appears to have the slight upper-hand because of its higher fill-rate. Of course, the game rendering performances of both boards are generally very high, befitting that of a high end board.

As we would have expected, where we see the biggest advantage for the 5900 Ultra is with FSAA rendering. With the added bandwidth demands of FSAA rendering, the 256-bit bus, running at the high RAM speeds that it is, allows the FSAA rendering performance to excel. It's a shame that new sampling positions could not make it into the design, but given this is a refresh part it's understandable that such a change would be a fairly major overhaul.

The Pixel Shader architecture still remains somewhat puzzling. NVIDIA state that its floating point performance has increased. In the tests that we've seen here we can certainly see that clock-for-clock the integer (DX8) pixel shader performance has not changed to any appreciable degree. Our testing shows only one clear case where the DX9 shader performance has increased over 5800 - the other Shader tests indicate that in most cases the DX9 partial precision performance remains the same as 5800 clock for clock and the full precision rendering is slower because the 5900 is running in full precision and has a performance hit due to the registers operating in FP32 mode on the 5900 and FP16 on the 5800. It is, however, certainly good to see that the 5900 Ultra is running at, or above in fact, Microsoft's DirectX9 Shader precisions.

Overall this board is an improvement over the 5800 Ultra, albeit an incremental one. The board solution itself is far better, and whilst it is still quite large, it is much quieter and cooler than the 5800. The addition of the 256-but memory is also very useful if FSAA rendering is required. It's been cited before that the NV35 is what the NV30 should have been in the first place, and that is probably the case.

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Thanks to John for the time spent copy editing.