Introduction
Close to two weeks back, NVIDIA finally announced the GeForce FX 5600 and GeForce FX 5200 series that were previously identified as NV31 and NV34 correspondingly. Basically, both were derived from the NV30 core used on the GeForce FX 5800 series but had gone through some cuts and moderations. However, all FX-based graphics card will feature the CineFX Engine and therefore, all would be DirectX 9.0 compliant. Considering that NVIDIAs strategy is to replace all their current graphics cards offering with only the GeForce FX 5800 / 5600 / 5200 series, that would mean the lowest till highest-end offering would be capable of highly detailed and realistic graphics based on DirectX 9. That means NVIDIA is the first graphics chip vendor to offer DirectX 9 technology to even the entry-level cards. Although their ability to perform at those circumstances will not be known till later and it is expected to be slow based on the specifications, still, the technology is there.
At almost the exact time-frame, ATI fought back with a slew of updated graphics cores to purposely match and exceed whatever NVIDIA has offered in terms of features and performance. ATIs premium offering of the RADEON 9800 Pro certainly looks to derail the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra and we have already mentioned in our previous article what kept NVIDIA delayed this long before the real product was made possible. Even then, it was only meant to be a direct competitor to the RADEON 9700 Pro. Due to the different approach taken by NVIDIA and the fact being that the NV30 is a stepping stone to what looks to be the final product in the form of the NV35 (at least from our point of view), we can only wait and speculate at that time if the architecture decision of the GeForce FX was a good move or not.
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Rumors have it that the new graphics cards from ATI would take much more than a month before consumers could get their hands on them. Meanwhile, if NVIDIA has its inventory management right, it is possible to obtain GeForce FX cards way before ATI starts stacking up their RADEON 9800 Pro cards on the retail shelves.
No sooner after we bid farewell to our GeForce FX 5800 Ultra evaluation unit from NVIDIA, we received MSIs FX5800 Ultra-TD8X graphics card. It came as no revelation to us since MSI has long been a loyal partner with NVIDIA and naturally, they would be among the first to offer GeForce FX products. Here are the detailed specifications of the MSI FX5800 Ultra-TD8X :-
MSI FX5800 Ultra-TD8X Technical Specifications
| Graphics Engine |
- NVIDIA GeForce FX 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 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
- Two-sided stencil
- Keyframe animation
- Programmable matrix palette skinning
- Custom lens effects: fish eye, wide angle,fresnel effects, water
refraction
- Intellisample 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 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: 300/500 MHz (core/DDR
memory)
- Default clock speed in 32D environment: 500/1000 MHZ (core/DDR
memory)
- 16GB/sec Memory Bandwidth
- AGP 8X including fast writes and sideband addressing
- Advanced thermal monitoring and thermal management
- FX Flow cooling solution
- Microsoft DirectX 9.0 optimizations and support
- OpenGL 1.4 optimizations and support
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| Graphics Memory |
- 128MB DDR II SDRAM of 500MHz clock rate (effective speed of
1GHz DDR)
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| RAMDAC |
- Dual 400MHz RAMDACs that support resolutions of
2048x1536@85Hz
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| Connectors |
- 1x analog RGB connector
- 1x mini-DIN connector (for TV-output)
- 1x DVI-I connector (for Digital Flat Panel displays)
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| Drivers |
- Driver support for Microsoft Windows 98/98SE/Me/NT 4.0/2000/XP, Mac
OS 9/X and Linux
- NVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
- Fully compliant professional OpenGL 1.4 API with NVIDIA extensions
- Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon
- The Elder Scrolls III : Morrowind (2 discs)
- Duke Nukem Manhattan Project
- 7-in-1 Games Collections : The Sum of All Fears, Beam Breakers, IL-2
Sturmovik, Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, Rally Trophy, Beam
Breakers, Zax: The Alien Hunter, Oni
- FarStone VirtualDrive & RestoreIT!
- InterVideo WinDVD 5.1 Channel & Supreme Foreign Language
Learning Machine
- InterVideo WinProducer/WinCoder & Professional Users' Pack
- Trend PC-cillin 2002
- ThinSoft Be Twin
- E-Color 3Deep
- MSI Utilities
- MSI 3D Desktop
- MSI Media Center
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| Other Information |
- AGP 2.0/3.0 slot required
- 1 spare slot next to the AGP port is required.
- 1 PCI-assigned IRQ Required
- 1 four-pin power connector
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