This time the boyz from Hexus (UK) jump in the field. For reasons of space and overview I will add all follow ups from now on to this post, under the read more option. Hexus.net: The cooler has undergone a makeover in the interim period between 5800 Ultra and 5900 Ultra releases. It's difficult to be objective, but it appears to put out no more than half the 5800's racket when running full tilt in 3D mode. Loud but bearable is how we'd put it. The short space of time between the NV30 and NV35's launch tells us that the changes relate to bandwidth, primarily. Sure, there's a touch more bandwidth-saving going on and some advances in rendering shadows, but the NV35 is just an evolution of a decent design. ExtremeTech: There was a fair amount of controversy surrounding exactly how many pixel pipes the NV30 had. nVidia has stated publicly that NV30, and now NV35 can do the following: If doing Z+color operation, 4 pixels/clock If doing shader-only, texture-only, or stencil-only, then 8 pixels/clock This means that the NV35's fill rate can vary considerably, depending on the type of operation being executed, so quoting a single fill rate number is all but impossible. NV35's fill rate is 3.6Gpixels/sec in the eight pixels/clock case (the 5900 Ultra has a 450MHz engine clock speed) or 1.8Gpixels/sec in the case of 4 pixels/clock. AnandTech: Nvidia's Detonator FX drivers will be publicly available on May 14th and will improve performance across the board for all FX cards, we will be following up with a performance article later this week entailing the exact performance improvements you can expect from the Detonator FX drivers. We encountered no issues with the drivers, and we're glad NVIDIA finally changed their anisotropic filtering quality settings to match up with ATI's (as well as fix the image quality issues we've been griping about all this time)... [H]ardOCP - GeForce FX 5900 Ultra - Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB (both cards): It is clear; Pixel Shader 2.0 performance is vastly improved on the NV35 core. This is the main reason we earlier suggested that this core represents a bit more than a refresh. The numbers highlighted in yellow are the highest score for that test. Finally we have the GeForceFX 5900 Ultra card actually leading a healthy majority of tests compared to the 9800 Pro 256MB card. It is very nice though to see that the GeForceFX 5900 Ultra 256MB video card is finally showing great results in the race for Pixel Shader performance and this of course we come into play as more games take advantage of the PS coding. Sudhian Media: What is UltraShadow? Simply put, UltraShadow accelerates shadows. Think of it as a Z-Occlusion test for shadows ? the card can determine what areas of a shadow will be too far away to be seen or otherwise do not need to be rendered and simply toss them out.