Gigabyte's New Partner And The GeForce FX 5950 Ultra
Gigabyte has in the past produced both NVIDIA and ATI based graphics cards but in the last two years, we have seen Gigabyte producing graphics cards based on ATI’s VPUs exclusively. That changed on 22nd October 2003, when the company announced a renewed partnership with NVIDIA for graphics card solutions. For now it seems, Gigabyte is interested in maintaining both the NVIDIA GPU and ATI VPU product lines, but only time will tell if this would remain just as they have done so in the distant past. What does this mean for the consumers? Strong competition already exists within the graphics card industry, so with Gigabyte expanding its offerings, you can expect even more choices and better value for money. For NVIDIA, they have gained a valuable partner because of Gigabyte’s vast OEM reach and as well as an established retail name in the PC industry.
So far, whenever ATI churns out a new VPU, Gigabyte has always been the first vendor to send us their evaluation sample. Now, with Gigabyte manufacturing NVIDIA-based cards, they were once again the first to send us an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra based graphics card. Before we discuss about the product at hand, we’ll share with you more information about the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. Initially codenamed as NV38, the GeForce FX5950 Ultra hasn’t seen much changes since the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra besides the increase in core and memory clock operating frequencies. Where the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra operated at 450/850MHz, the new FX5950 Ultra runs at 475/950MHz and is fitted with a new reference cooler design that sort of matured from the old ‘dust buster’. Note that there will be no non-Ultra version of the GeForce FX 5950.
For Gigabyte to ship new GeForce FX 5950 Ultra graphics cards in such short notice, they have used NVIDIA’s reference models to fulfill current demand. We hope Gigabyte would soon have a custom designed solution to differentiate their products from the competition and add a touch of personalization.
Even the box design was unpretentious; definitely unlike the box packaging of Gigabyte motherboards and their existing RADEON series of graphics cards.
|
We will detail more aspects of the Gigabyte GeForce FX 5950 Ultra graphics card (GV-N595U) on the following page but before that, here are its detailed specifications:-
Gigabyte GV-N595U 256MB Technical Specifications
| Graphics Engine |
- NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra GPU
- High Precision 3D Rendering Engine
- 8 pixels per clock rendering engine
- Full 128-bit Precision Graphics Pipeline
- Native support for 128-bit / 64-bit floating point and 32-bit
integer rendering modes
- Up to 16 textures per pass
- CineFX 2.0 Engine
- Advanced Pixel Shaders allow floating-point pixel shader
operations to run 2x faster than CineFX 1.0 Engine.
- Support for DX 9.0 Pixel Shader 2.0+
- Support for DX 9.0 Vertex Shader 2.0+
- Very long pixel programs up to 1024 instructions
- Very long vertex programs with up to 256 static instructions and
up to 65536 instructions executed before termination
- Subroutines in shader programs
- Dynamic flow control
- Procedural shading
- Z-correct bump-mapping
- Hardware-accelerated shadow effects with shadow buffers
- UltraShadow Technology to accelerate shadow computations
- Two-sided stencil
- Keyframe animation
- Programmable matrix palette skinning
- Custom lens effects: fish eye, wide angle,fresnel effects, water
refraction
- Intellisample HCT Technology
- Loss-less Color Compression and Z Compression (up to 4:1
ratio in real time)
- Fast Z-clear
- Adaptive texture filtering
- Dynamic Gamma Correction
- Fast antialiasing and compression performance
- High Compression Technology (HCT) increases visual quality at high
resolutions with fast performance
- DirectX and S3TC texture compression
- Integrated NTSC/PAL TV encoder support resolutions up to 1024x768
with built-in Macrovision copy protection
- Video Mixing Renderer (VMR)
- DVD and HDTV-ready MPEG-2 decoding up to 1920x1080i resolutions
- Dual DVO ports for interfacing to external TMDS transmitters and
external HDTV encoders
- Support for dual-link DVI with resolutions support of 1600x1200.
- High-performance 2D rendering engine
- Digital Vibrance Control 3.0 (DVC)
- nView Multi-display Technology
- Default clock speed in 2D environment: 300/950 MHz (core/DDR
memory)
- Default clock speed in 3D environment: 475/950 MHZ (core/DDR
memory)
- 256-bit memory interface
- 30.4GB/sec Memory Bandwidth
- AGP 8X including fast writes and sideband addressing
- Advanced thermal monitoring and thermal management
- Microsoft DirectX 9.0 optimizations and support
- OpenGL 1.4 optimizations and support
|
| Graphics Memory |
- 256MB DDR I SDRAM of 475MHz clock rate (effective speed of
950MHz DDR)
|
| RAMDAC |
- Dual 400MHz RAMDACs that support resolutions of
2048x1536@85Hz
|
| Video Decoder / Encoder |
|
| Connectors |
- 1x analog RGB connector
- 1x mini-DIN connector (for Video-in / Video-out)
- 1x DVI-I connector (for Digital Flat Panel displays)
|
| Drivers |
- Driver support for Microsoft Windows 95/98/98SE/Me/NT
4.0/2000/XP, Linux IA32 / IA64 / AMD64 and FreeBSD
- NVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
- Fully compliant professional OpenGL 1.4 API with NVIDIA extensions
- Complete DirectX support including 9.0 and lower
|
| Software / Games |
- CyberLink Power DVD 5.0
- CyberLink Power Director 2.55 ME
- Tomb Raider: Angle Of Darkness
- Will Rock
- Raven Shield
|
| Other Information |
- AGP 2.0/3.0 slot required
- 1 PCI-assigned IRQ Required
- 1 four-pin power connector
|
Singapore
Malaysia
Philippines
Thailand
Australia 
Channels
TECH GUIDES
By 
