NVidia's FX 5900 Chip: Slim Edge, Steep Price

NVidia promotes its new GeForce FX 5900 Ultra chip as "the fastest GPU in history." That may be, but if so, it isn't by much: In tests with current games, the 5900 Ultra, equipped with 256MB of SDRAM, gave a relatively small performance boost over the NVidia 5800 Ultra and a reference card based on ATI's Radeon 9800 Pro chip (both with 128MB) in the same PC.

NVidia is eager to make up for the shortcomings of its last release, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, which was late and used a cooling mechanism so loud that some critics called it "the lawnmower." The 5900 Ultra is far quieter, but it still occupies two slots and will cost you: $500 for 256MB models and $400 for 128MB ones (cards should be in stores now).

In our tests, the 5900 Ultra improved the games Serious Sam 2 and Unreal Tournament 2002 (UT) by just a few frames per second over a 5800 Ultra-based card at 1280 by 1024. Only at 1600 by 1200 did the 5900 pull markedly ahead of the 5800 (see chart--click on lower-right corner for full view).

Similarly, ATI's 9800 Pro produced about 10 fps more than the 5900 at lower resolutions of UT (not shown), but it dropped off at higher ones.

In the UT antialiasing test, the 5900 trailed both of its main rivals. And although the 5900 has a reworked anisotropic filtering engine, the ATI card provided superior image quality in our subjective tests. Antialiasing softens jagged edges on 3D images, and anisotropic filtering helps smooth scenes where textured images, like a tiled floor, start in the foreground and extend back.

The 5900 Ultra's features are more tuned for forthcoming games. One such feature, UltraShadow, renders shadows and scenes more efficiently, making games like the upcoming Doom III and Half-Life 2 run both faster and smoother, NVidia says. But such titles won't be in stores until fall. So for the time being, save your money.