MSI GeForce FX 5900 XT


The MSI GeForce FX 5900 XT - Page 3

The MSI GeForce FX5900XT-VTD128
A Value Priced Powerhouse...

By, Marco Chiappetta
March 25, 2004

Benchmarks With Unreal Tournament 2003
DX8 Performance


Unreal Tournament 2003

Epic's Unreal Tournament series has consistently been one of the most popular first person shooters, and by no coincidence is it also one of the most commonly used video card benchmarks. We continued our DirectX benchmarking with a completely patched, retail version Unreal Tournament 2003. When benchmarking with UT2003, we use a utility that ensures all of the cards are being tested with the exact same in-game settings and "High-Quality" graphical options. We ran the UT2003 benchmarks at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1600x1200 without anti-aliasing, and then again with 4X enabled. We kept Anisotropic filtering disabled in UT2003 because NVIDIA and ATi aren't doing the same level of trilinear filtering when aniso and trilinear are enabled together in this game.

With the Unreal Tournament 2003 benchmark set to 1024x768, all three of the cards performed similarly, but the MSI FX5900XT-VTD128 still outperformed the others by roughly 10%, both with and without AA.  The performance delta separating the MSI card from its competition increased significantly when we bumped the resolution up to 1600x1200, however.  At the higher resolution without anti-aliasing, MSI's FX5900XT-VTD128 pulled ahead of the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra by roughly 49% - with AA enabled the delta increased to 55%.

Head-to-Head Performance With Splinter Cell
Stealth Pixel Shading


Splinter Cell

Splinter Cell's version 1.2 patch includes three pre-recorded demos and incorporates a previously unavailable benchmarking tool.  The demos included with the patch are somewhat limited by CPU performance, however, so we used the custom Oil Rig demo created by the folks at Beyond 3D to test with this game.  Beyond 3D's demo removes two CPU intensive routines while increasing dependence on Pixel Shader performance.  Shaders are used to render the realistic looking ocean water surrounding the Oil Rig in the demo, as well as simulating a night vision effect.  Also note that anti-aliasing doesn't work with Splinter cell (at least with the current version).  Due to this fact, we do not have any AA scores listed in the graphs below.

It was another clear victory for the MSI GeForce FX5900XT-VTD128 in the Splinter Cell benchmark.  In this test, the Radeon 9600 XT and GeForce FX 5700 Ultra performed at virtually the same level, but the MSI card was much faster.  The FX5900XT-VTD128 outran the 9600 XT and 5700 Ultra by 41% at 1024x768, and it beat them by 39.5% at 1600x1200.

Final Fantasy & Gun Metal Tests


Tags:  MSI, GeForce, MS, force, fx, XT

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