Nordichardware.com's Anton Nilsson has posted his Gainward GeForce FX 5800 Ultra review. Take a peek, there's some interestiing stuff concerning the texture filtering quality compared to the GF4 etc. Here's a snip:
There has been a lot of talk going on about the upcoming FX 5800 Ultra Golden Sample from Gainward. To mention some; the more quiet cooling and the included sound card(!) have aroused a lot of interest. One thing's for sure; Gainward has definitely not been saving on accessories. And finally they've put some effort into a more "mature" box design, no more sci-fi space chicks. We have not yet had any deep introduction of the NV30 architecture on NordicHardware, but now, as the chip has been around various websites for preview we don't feel very compelled to spend much time looking at the techical aspects of GeForce FX. Instead we choose to focus the whole retail product. Nevertheless, a few comments on the architecture won't hurt. For example that this chip supports DirectX 9.0 and that nVidia took one step further by having partial support for Pixel Shader and Vertex Shader 2.0 Extended. From what we've gathered, nVidia didn't quite make it all the way, thus they chose to call it 2.0+ which isn't a "real" DirectX standard. Weather the extended support for DirectX will be used or not remains is yet to be seen.
A look at the specifications says a great deal. As the most probably knows nVidia has chosen to go after insane clock frequencies this time. A core at 500 Mhz gives the card an incredible high fillrate. Certainly some complications exist, making NV30 not really a fully fledged 8x1 architecture, but since this isn't a first look at the technology itself, just a usual "retail-review", we will spend less time on this. The fillrate is high, in many cases even higher than Radeon 9800 Pro can offer, especially if we look at Texel Fillrate. nVidia has, as you might know, chosen to equip NV30 with a 128 bit memory bus. To compensate this nVidia uses DDR-II memories from Samsung clocked at 1 GHz. Together with a 128 bit bus this means that the card has a bandwidth of approximately 16 GB/s which is somehwat less than the challengers Radeon 9700 Pro and 9800 Pro.
Gainward GeForce FX 5800 Ultra Review
There has been a lot of talk going on about the upcoming FX 5800 Ultra Golden Sample from Gainward. To mention some; the more quiet cooling and the included sound card(!) have aroused a lot of interest. One thing's for sure; Gainward has definitely not been saving on accessories. And finally they've put some effort into a more "mature" box design, no more sci-fi space chicks. We have not yet had any deep introduction of the NV30 architecture on NordicHardware, but now, as the chip has been around various websites for preview we don't feel very compelled to spend much time looking at the techical aspects of GeForce FX. Instead we choose to focus the whole retail product. Nevertheless, a few comments on the architecture won't hurt. For example that this chip supports DirectX 9.0 and that nVidia took one step further by having partial support for Pixel Shader and Vertex Shader 2.0 Extended. From what we've gathered, nVidia didn't quite make it all the way, thus they chose to call it 2.0+ which isn't a "real" DirectX standard. Weather the extended support for DirectX will be used or not remains is yet to be seen.
A look at the specifications says a great deal. As the most probably knows nVidia has chosen to go after insane clock frequencies this time. A core at 500 Mhz gives the card an incredible high fillrate. Certainly some complications exist, making NV30 not really a fully fledged 8x1 architecture, but since this isn't a first look at the technology itself, just a usual "retail-review", we will spend less time on this. The fillrate is high, in many cases even higher than Radeon 9800 Pro can offer, especially if we look at Texel Fillrate. nVidia has, as you might know, chosen to equip NV30 with a 128 bit memory bus. To compensate this nVidia uses DDR-II memories from Samsung clocked at 1 GHz. Together with a 128 bit bus this means that the card has a bandwidth of approximately 16 GB/s which is somehwat less than the challengers Radeon 9700 Pro and 9800 Pro.
Gainward GeForce FX 5800 Ultra Review
