nVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra Reference Card
February 10, 2004
Manufacturer: nVIDIA
Introduction
The mainstream market has always been the most lucrative market for any graphics card manufacturer. You get this market and you can be sitting pretty on your rocking chair. This is true even if your flagship offering isn't doing that great. Some of the less known manufacturers doesn't even have a flagship card to start with. So basically, if you get this market, you have won the $ race.
nVIDIA and ATI of course knew this too well. There's no point winning the graphics crown when your mainstream card isn't doing too good. You may get the accollade for having the fastest card but you won't get the bucks which is more important. Thus the need to dominate this market. nVIDIA has been dominating this market until recently. Remember the Ti4200? At the time, there was no other card than you call competition against that mighty mainstream card. nVIDIA was producing so much Ti4200s that so many graphics companies were born with only the purpose of selling this highly sought after card. It was so in demand then that there were times that the Ti4200 was in shortage everywhere. Yeah those were the days that nVIDIA would definitely want to experience again.
Recently though ATI has proved to be a very tough competition for nVIDIA. The release of their Radeon 9500Pro saw the sudden death of nVIDIA's mainstream glory. This consumer card from ATI was so good that even nVIDIA's flagship at the time, the Ti4600, was struggling to get past it. Together with the 9700Pro, ATI handed nVIDIA the double whammy with the 9500Pro.
After Ti4200, the next mainstream card that nVIDIA released was the FX 5600 Ultra. It's life was short lived as the second revision was soon developed due to its lackluster performance against ATI's new mainstream card then, the 9600Pro. The new FX 5600 Ultra core though showed very good performance but failed to fully capture or dominate the mainstream market. It's hold on this position has now been shared with the equally excellent 9600Pro. Of course that's not good enough for anyone most especially nVIDIA. So whats' next?
In a bid to break the deadlock, nVIDIA quickly came back with a new mainstream card. Based on the NV36 core, this card aims to take solo lead in this highly targetted market. Does the new NV36 core have what it takes to convincingly defeat its ATI counterpart? Will it dominate the Radeon 9600Pro and the newest ATI offering, the 9600XT? Let us see if nVIDIA can reclaim its old glory in this department. Introducing, the nVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra!
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra 128mb Reference Card
The FX 5700 Ultra is very interesting indeed. Unlike the FX 5950 which is just an overclocked FX 5900, the FX 5700 Ultra is based on a different technology as the FX 5600 Ultra. One can easily describe the FX 5700 Ultra as a FX 5900 Ultra with half the pipelines and half the 256bit memory bus. Its clock speed is also faster than the FX 5600 Ultra. Its core is now at 475MHz, almost 20% faster. Another big change is the jump back to DDR2. Yup that's right folks, the FX 5700 Ultra uses 128mb of the more expensive DDR2. Clocked at 900MHz DDR, it is 12% faster than it's old brother. Having said all of that, it definitely sounds like a very big improvement over the FX 5600 Ultra. But will it be enough to challenge and dominate it's ATI competititon, the Radeon 9600Pro and 9600XT? Below is a table comparing the FX 5700 Ultra to all of the current mainstream cards.
| Graphics Card | Core/Memory | Memory Interface | Memory | Maximum Bandwidth |
| FX 5700 Ultra (NV36) | 475/900 | 128 bit | 128 mb DDR2 | 14.4 Gb/s |
| FX 5600 Ultra (NV31) | 400/800 | 128 bit | 128 mb | 12.8 Gb/s |
| Radeon 9600XT | 500/600 | 128 bit | 128 mb | 9.6. Gb/s |
| Radeon 9600Pro | 400/600 | 128 bit | 128 mb | 9.6 Gb/s |
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