NVIDIA GeForceFX 5600 Ultra & FX 5200 Ultra: Performance

Test Setup

Gaming :

• Unreal Tournament 2003 - DirectX 8.1 (PS 1.1/ 1.3/ 1.4)
• Aquanox: Revelation - DirectX 8 (PS 1.1)
• Splinter Cell (Beta) - DirectX 8 (PS 1.1)
• Serious Sam: Second Encounter - (OpenGL)

All tests were carried out without FSAA and anisotropic filtering. If you believe that the latest top cards today can cope with this, then look again at Splinter Cell. Here, the extensive effects, such as shadow calculations, bring even the top models to their knees - at least at maximum detail settings. Also, not all gamers make use of the quality improvements - not by a long shot - unless they prefer it, or are not familiar with it.

In Unreal Tournament, all cards were tested with 4XFSAA and 8x anisotropic filtering, as well as a combination of both. The top models were also tested with this in Splinter Cell. All tests were conducted with the maximum possible detail settings.

Synthetic Benchmarks :

• 3D Mark 2001 SE (b330) - DirectX 8.1 (PS 1.1/ 1.3/ 1.4)
• 3D Mark 2003 - DirectX 9 (PS 1.1/ 1.4/ 2.0)
• Codecreatures Benchmark - DirectX 8.1 (PS 1.1/ 1.3/ 1.4)

The synthetic benchmarks give you a good overview of the theoretical capabilities of the graphics cards. Although it's a bit controversial (more about this in the benchmark section), we also use 3D Mark 2003 as a DirectX 9 test.