TBreak was given the opportunity to test a first retail MSI GeForce FX. The card comes in a nicely designed package and features the notorious FlowFX cooling solution. More interesting than the card itself are the benchmarks. For benchmarking applications, Unreal Tournament 2003, 3D Mark 2001SE, 3D Mark 2003, Serious Sam Second Encounter, Vulpine GLMark, Code Creatures, Commanche4 and SpecViewPERF 7.0 were selected. The Detonators used in the review were 42.74 and 43.00 in comparison to Catalyst 03.2 on an ATI Radeon 9700Pro. There are a few hints in the review that should make you think:
As per our understanding from talking to a variety of manufaturers, the nVidia FX cards will be shipped with Detonators v43.00. However, these drivers are focused more on the stablity/quality side and thus for benchmarking, we were told to use v42.74. We've used both of these drivers to give you a comparison between the difference in results. Told to? Well I can imagine why (can anyone say 16bit?). Anyhow things get interesting when you compare GeForce FX 5800 Ultra Detonator 43.00 results with ATI Radeon 9700 Pro Catalyst 03.2 results: Again, we see the FX overtaking the Radeon 9700 in all resolutions, however, only with the 42.74 drivers. With 43.00 drivers, the Radeon comes on top in two out of three resolutions. UT2003 liked the GeForce FX whereas Sam favoured the Radeon more. Commanche 4 was pretty much identical on both the cards. Also worth mentioning is the noticable difference between the two driver versions. This is one benchmark (3DMark03) where we see a huge difference between the different Detonators especially under Pixel Shader 2.0. TBreak MSI GeForce FX 5800 Ultra Retail Review
As per our understanding from talking to a variety of manufaturers, the nVidia FX cards will be shipped with Detonators v43.00. However, these drivers are focused more on the stablity/quality side and thus for benchmarking, we were told to use v42.74. We've used both of these drivers to give you a comparison between the difference in results. Told to? Well I can imagine why (can anyone say 16bit?). Anyhow things get interesting when you compare GeForce FX 5800 Ultra Detonator 43.00 results with ATI Radeon 9700 Pro Catalyst 03.2 results: Again, we see the FX overtaking the Radeon 9700 in all resolutions, however, only with the 42.74 drivers. With 43.00 drivers, the Radeon comes on top in two out of three resolutions. UT2003 liked the GeForce FX whereas Sam favoured the Radeon more. Commanche 4 was pretty much identical on both the cards. Also worth mentioning is the noticable difference between the two driver versions. This is one benchmark (3DMark03) where we see a huge difference between the different Detonators especially under Pixel Shader 2.0. TBreak MSI GeForce FX 5800 Ultra Retail Review
