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One of the best looking and most notorious cards of all time!
"But was GeForce FX any good?
Nvidia’s joke marketing video did one good job for the company, which was to focus attention on the cooling system, rather than the GPU. Even the discussion at the beginning of the video describes the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra as ‘the most powerful graphics card on the planet’, which was stretching the truth at best. It was definitely more powerful than the GeForce 4 Ti cards that preceded it, but it was also up against some seriously powerful competition from ATi (before it was bought by AMD).
Before we get into the details, let’s step back and take a look at the graphics landscape at this time. DirectX 8 had introduced us to the potential for programmable shaders – small programs that could be run directly on a GPU by its dedicated pixel and vertex processors, sometimes called pipelines. We still use pixel and vertex shaders today, but they’re now processed by all-purpose stream processors, rather than dedicated pixel and vertex processors.
There was clearly a lot of potential here – you could see it in the beautiful Nature section of the 3DMark2001 benchmark, but games that supported DirectX 8’s shader model were few and far between. It was supported by Nvidia’s GeForce 3 and GeForce 4 Ti chips, as well as the Radeon 8500, but it was rarely used at the time.
It’s for this reason that cheaper GPUs, such as the Radeon 7500 and GeForce 4 MX, had no support at all for shaders and were available to buy at the same time. For context, the Nintendo Wii still had no shader support when it was released in 2006.
There were some notable games that supported early shaders, such as The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and Unreal Tournament 2003, but the vast majority of games still used fixed-function pipelines. That situation started to change over the next year, with the launch of more high-profile titles such as Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, as well as the launch of DirectX 9 and Shader Model 2, which introduced a more flexible shader model.
Shader Model 2 massively increased the number of pixel shader instruction slots from 8+4 to 32+64, and it upped the texture instruction limit from four in Pixel Shader 1.3 to 32 in Pixel Shader 2. Likewise, the number of vertex shader instruction slots doubled from 128 to 256, with the ability to execute a maximum of 1,024 vertex instructions in Vertex Shader 2, compared to just 128 in Vertex Shader 1.1.
The problem for Nvidia was that ATi had got to Shader Model 2 long before the launch of GeForce FX. The ATi Radeon 9700 had eight pixel processors and four vertex processors. It didn’t use all the latest tech – it came with 128MB of DDR memory and was built on a 150nm process, but it had a single-slot cooler that didn’t make an awful noise and it beat Nvidia in the Shader Model 2 arms race by several months.
To make matters worse, ATi launched an update, the Radeon 9800 Pro, in the same time frame as the GeForce FX launch in early 2003. Based on the same Rage 8 architecture, it upped the GPU clock speed from the 9700’s 275MHz to 380MHz, and increased the memory frequency from 270MHz (540MHz effective) to 340MHz (680MHz effective).
When the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra finally launched in March 2003, the battle was already over before it had begun. It launched with four pixel processors, compared to the Radeon 9700’s eight, and three vertex processors, compared to four on the 9700. It could barely compete with the GPU that had come out nine months beforehand, let alone ATi’s latest 9800 Pro.
Limited bandwidth
Of course, comparing the number of shaders isn’t an apples-to-apples likeness on paper, due to the underlying differences in architecture, and that applies just as much today as it did then. For starters, unlike ATi’s GPUs at that time, GeForce FX supported the superior Shader Model 2a, which was even more powerful than Shader Model 2. The GeForce FX 5800 Ultra also had the benefit of using the latest GDDR2 memory, with a top effective clock speed of 1GHz compared to 680MHz on the 9800 Pro.
However, despite ATI’s card’s using slower memory, they were attached to a much wider interface. With a 256-bit wide interface at its disposal, the Radeon 9800 Pro had a total memory bandwidth of 21.76GB/s from its 680MHz (effective) DDR RAM.
Comparatively, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra only had a 128-bit wide interface so, despite its faster memory, it only had a total memory bandwidth of 16GB/s. Basically, Nvidia’s choice to pair its GDDR2 memory with a tight interface largely negated the point of using it. That was a big deal – you could get away with slower shader performance in a world where few games used programmable shaders, but restricted memory bandwidth opened up ATi’s lead in real-world gaming tests as well.
Saving GeForce FX
Once Nvidia had nursed its wounds from the reaction to its disappointing GPU and comical cooler, the company then had to make the best of the situation, as the GeForce FX architecture was all it had. A year later, it would be back on top with its superb GeForce 6000-series GPUs, but in the meantime, it had to make GeForce FX work.
The 5800 Ultra was largely abandoned by the industry, and Nvidia brought out the GeForce FX 5900 series of GPUs. Like the ATi competition, these cards went back to using DDR memory, but with a 256-bit wide interface. In the case of the top-end FX 5950, the memory was clocked at 475MHz (950MHz effective) and had a 475MHz GPU clock.
Nvidia also tweaked the cooler design. The FX Flow model was largely abandoned at this point, with many card manufacturers using their own traditional cooler designs for the GeForce FX 5900 XT and 5900 Ultra, squeezing cards into a single-slot design with a single cooling fan.
We would like to say a big thank you to Dmitriy ‘H_Rush’ who very kindly shared these fantastic photos of a Gainward GeForce FX 5800 Ultra with us for this feature. You can see more of his extensive graphics card collection at vccollection."
Source: https://www.custompc.com/nvidia-gef..._qoCRf3HSx1mlrB0XiN0ye-_9_XmG3E_O1ThjrCG--VAM
"But was GeForce FX any good?
Nvidia’s joke marketing video did one good job for the company, which was to focus attention on the cooling system, rather than the GPU. Even the discussion at the beginning of the video describes the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra as ‘the most powerful graphics card on the planet’, which was stretching the truth at best. It was definitely more powerful than the GeForce 4 Ti cards that preceded it, but it was also up against some seriously powerful competition from ATi (before it was bought by AMD).
Before we get into the details, let’s step back and take a look at the graphics landscape at this time. DirectX 8 had introduced us to the potential for programmable shaders – small programs that could be run directly on a GPU by its dedicated pixel and vertex processors, sometimes called pipelines. We still use pixel and vertex shaders today, but they’re now processed by all-purpose stream processors, rather than dedicated pixel and vertex processors.
There was clearly a lot of potential here – you could see it in the beautiful Nature section of the 3DMark2001 benchmark, but games that supported DirectX 8’s shader model were few and far between. It was supported by Nvidia’s GeForce 3 and GeForce 4 Ti chips, as well as the Radeon 8500, but it was rarely used at the time.
It’s for this reason that cheaper GPUs, such as the Radeon 7500 and GeForce 4 MX, had no support at all for shaders and were available to buy at the same time. For context, the Nintendo Wii still had no shader support when it was released in 2006.
There were some notable games that supported early shaders, such as The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and Unreal Tournament 2003, but the vast majority of games still used fixed-function pipelines. That situation started to change over the next year, with the launch of more high-profile titles such as Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, as well as the launch of DirectX 9 and Shader Model 2, which introduced a more flexible shader model.
Shader Model 2 massively increased the number of pixel shader instruction slots from 8+4 to 32+64, and it upped the texture instruction limit from four in Pixel Shader 1.3 to 32 in Pixel Shader 2. Likewise, the number of vertex shader instruction slots doubled from 128 to 256, with the ability to execute a maximum of 1,024 vertex instructions in Vertex Shader 2, compared to just 128 in Vertex Shader 1.1.
The problem for Nvidia was that ATi had got to Shader Model 2 long before the launch of GeForce FX. The ATi Radeon 9700 had eight pixel processors and four vertex processors. It didn’t use all the latest tech – it came with 128MB of DDR memory and was built on a 150nm process, but it had a single-slot cooler that didn’t make an awful noise and it beat Nvidia in the Shader Model 2 arms race by several months.
To make matters worse, ATi launched an update, the Radeon 9800 Pro, in the same time frame as the GeForce FX launch in early 2003. Based on the same Rage 8 architecture, it upped the GPU clock speed from the 9700’s 275MHz to 380MHz, and increased the memory frequency from 270MHz (540MHz effective) to 340MHz (680MHz effective).
When the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra finally launched in March 2003, the battle was already over before it had begun. It launched with four pixel processors, compared to the Radeon 9700’s eight, and three vertex processors, compared to four on the 9700. It could barely compete with the GPU that had come out nine months beforehand, let alone ATi’s latest 9800 Pro.
Limited bandwidth
Of course, comparing the number of shaders isn’t an apples-to-apples likeness on paper, due to the underlying differences in architecture, and that applies just as much today as it did then. For starters, unlike ATi’s GPUs at that time, GeForce FX supported the superior Shader Model 2a, which was even more powerful than Shader Model 2. The GeForce FX 5800 Ultra also had the benefit of using the latest GDDR2 memory, with a top effective clock speed of 1GHz compared to 680MHz on the 9800 Pro.
However, despite ATI’s card’s using slower memory, they were attached to a much wider interface. With a 256-bit wide interface at its disposal, the Radeon 9800 Pro had a total memory bandwidth of 21.76GB/s from its 680MHz (effective) DDR RAM.
Comparatively, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra only had a 128-bit wide interface so, despite its faster memory, it only had a total memory bandwidth of 16GB/s. Basically, Nvidia’s choice to pair its GDDR2 memory with a tight interface largely negated the point of using it. That was a big deal – you could get away with slower shader performance in a world where few games used programmable shaders, but restricted memory bandwidth opened up ATi’s lead in real-world gaming tests as well.
Saving GeForce FX
Once Nvidia had nursed its wounds from the reaction to its disappointing GPU and comical cooler, the company then had to make the best of the situation, as the GeForce FX architecture was all it had. A year later, it would be back on top with its superb GeForce 6000-series GPUs, but in the meantime, it had to make GeForce FX work.
The 5800 Ultra was largely abandoned by the industry, and Nvidia brought out the GeForce FX 5900 series of GPUs. Like the ATi competition, these cards went back to using DDR memory, but with a 256-bit wide interface. In the case of the top-end FX 5950, the memory was clocked at 475MHz (950MHz effective) and had a 475MHz GPU clock.
Nvidia also tweaked the cooler design. The FX Flow model was largely abandoned at this point, with many card manufacturers using their own traditional cooler designs for the GeForce FX 5900 XT and 5900 Ultra, squeezing cards into a single-slot design with a single cooling fan.
We would like to say a big thank you to Dmitriy ‘H_Rush’ who very kindly shared these fantastic photos of a Gainward GeForce FX 5800 Ultra with us for this feature. You can see more of his extensive graphics card collection at vccollection."
Source: https://www.custompc.com/nvidia-gef..._qoCRf3HSx1mlrB0XiN0ye-_9_XmG3E_O1ThjrCG--VAM
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