Page 1 - A Stormy Introduction
Product name: Tornado GeForce FX 5700 UltraDescription: GeForce FX 5700 Ultra 128 MB GDDR3
Info: InnoVision - Inno3D
Price: ~190 EUR
In today's review we are going to talk about the popular NVIDIA GeForce 5700 Ultra and as you may or may not know, a lot of manufacturers have updated this product with a new type of memory: GDDR3. The product today comes from InnoVision's sub-section Inno3D, a well known hardware manufacturer, it's their first Guru3D.com review here. InnoVision is a Hong Kong based manufacturer that produces a number of multimedia products aimed at both the OEM and retail market. These products range from VGA cards, obviously, to mainboards, audio cards and digital video products. As a close partner of NVIDIA, InnoVision is a reputable company with a keen insight on what the end-user demands: quality and unique designs. They offer GeForce based graphics cards from low to high-end. In today's review we'll be in-between them, the mid-end GeForce FX 5700 Ultra equipped with 128 MB GDDR-3 memory.
Why the use of third generation DDR memory? Simple, it has certain advantages over DDR1/2. First of all, lower voltage is needed to juice up the silicon. Less juice means less heat, so it can be clocked higher. For comparison, the original FX 5700 Ultra's memory chips were only rated to run at 450MHz and required 2.5V. The product we test today can run clock speeds up to 500MHz and on only 1.9V.
The GDDR3 equipped graphics card still has a 128-bit memory bus.
The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra is the follow-up of the FX 5600 Ultra, a product that is lined up against ATI's mid-range Radeon 9600 XT. Right now, price for peformance, this and the GeForce FX 5900 XT will be the most interesting NVIDIA products for most of you. It's affordable and it reminds me of the GeForce 4 Ti 4200 release two years ago. What NVIDIA did was clever, the 5700 Ultra got a really nice performance bump over the 5600 series and it moves closer towards the high-end performing cards. Of course, it won't perform at that level, but what I thought was missing in the 5600 series, this product is making up for.
Today we'll show you an overview of the card with the help of a nice photo shoot, overview of the drivers and then of course we'll dig into our benchmark suite where we have tested the card in both RAW and quality setting 8x Anisotropic Filtering + 4x Antialiasing.
Memory Configuration :- 128 / 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 Memory
- Powered by nVidia GeForce FX 5700 Ultra GPU
- 256-bit graphic core and 128-bit memory interface
- 0.13 micron process technology
- Nvidia CineFX 2.0 engine
- Nvidia UltraShadow technology
- Nvidia Intellisample high-resolution compression technology (HCT)
- True 128-bit studio precision computation
- Advanced pixel shaders
- Supports shading language like for Cg and HLSL
- Nvidia ForceWare unified software environment (USE)
- Nvidia Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
- Optimizations and Support for DirectX9 and OpenGL 1.5
- Nvidia nViewTM multi-display technology
- Nvidia Digital Vibrance Control (DVC) 3.0
- 4 Pixels/Clock Rendering Pipeline
- Supports AGP8X interface (2.1 GB/s Bandwidth to System)
- Dual 400MHz RAMDACs supports up to 2048*1536 at 85Hz
- DVI Output supports up to 1600*1200
- Integrated NTSC & PAL TV encoder supports up to 1024*768 resolution
- Integrated full hardware MPEG2 decoder accelerates DVD playback
- 64-phase video scaler
