8 Rendering Pipelines - The Way To Go

For the past year, there has been a very distinct line of definition between graphics cards classified as high-end and the rest of them. From our testing and evaluation, we have found every GPU/VPU endowed with eight pixel rendering pipelines to be performing very much better than other GPU/VPU models of the mid and low-end series, which are mostly dominated by chips with four pixel rendering pipelines. Of course, all of these high-end models have also been generously designed to operate with high-speed memory and offer huge memory bandwidth between the graphics card’s local frame buffer and the GPU/VPU.

The earliest graphics card with a combination of these parameters was the ATI RADEON 9700 series and even after more than a year, it is still considered a high-end performer. Today, newer models have depleted that series and the current graphics card entries with eight rendering pipelines and huge memory bandwidth are those based on the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 and the ATI RADEON 9800. Although they carry a heavy price, the recent launch of NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5950 Ultra (NV38) and the ATI RADEON 9800XT, have helped lower prices of other high-end graphics card models such as the GeForce FX5900, GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, RADEON 9800 and RADEON 9800 PRO. Still, they fetch a price tag only justifiable for those with deep pockets, but for those who can afford them, these entry-level high-end graphics cards make a very good proposition as you will soon find out. In this review, we take a look at the MSI FX5900-VTD128 that is based on the FX 5900 GPU with 128MB DDR memory as well as comparing a number of other graphics card models for a better view of how this GPU stacks up.

You probably won't see a packaging as bold as MSI's graphics card anywhere else.

The primary contender to the GeForce FX 5900 is the RADEON 9800 and surprisingly, they aren’t priced too far apart either. The table below describes the GPU/VPU's specifications compared with other lower-end chips :-