I played with some of the clocks to see if this was true. By changing the core speed of the GPU by too much, the frame rates in 3DMark05 would drop. By the same token, by raising just the memory speeds I would get a better score, but if it was too far out of sync with the CPU, RAM, and GPU, then the score would actually suffer compared to the stock speeds. Now this could be due to other reasons, but when I ran the card above spec proportionality to other components that I overclocked, my scores only went up - never down. Of course, we have only had the cards for a week and it will take some time getting the true feel for them.

NVIDIA CineFX 4.0 Shading Architecture

• Vertex Shaders
• • Supports DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader 3.0
  • Displacement mapping
  • Geometry instancing
  • Infinite length vertex programs
• Pixel Shaders
• • Support for DirectX 9.0 Pixel Shader 3.0
  • Support for Multiple Render Targets (MRTs)
  • Advanced 16x anisotropic filtering (with up to 128 taps)
  • Transparent multisampling and transparent supersampling modes boost antialiasing quality to new levels
  • Infinite length pixel programs
• Texture Engine
• • Maximum of 16 textures per rendering pass
  • Support for 16 bit and 32 bit floating point format
  • Support for sRGB texture format for gamma textures
  • DirectX and S3TC texture compression
• Application Programming Interfaces (API)
• • Support for both DirectX and OpenGL (including 2.0)
• Continued Applications
• • Ultra Shadow II (shadow calculations optimization)

NVIDIA first introduced Ultra Shadow on the 5900 Ultra. You can read more about it .