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The wait
for NVIDIA's new GeForce has been almost an eternity it
seems. Since their initial hints at their next
generation technology,
back in June, there has been much speculation and
rumor milling with regards to the specifics of the
retail board level product and its forthcoming release
to the public. Also since that time, NVIDIA's arch
rival ATi Technologies, has released
several
variants of retail product, based on their R300 VPU.
This release of ATi product not only arrived much sooner
than NVIDIA's next gen technology, but also delivered a
stinging blow to NVIDIA's historic dominance in 3D
Graphics. The move to .13 micron technology proved
to be too much of a stretch, for the then flawlessly
executing 3D Graphics ASIC design machine out of Silicon
Valley. They bet the farm on TSMC and their
bleeding edge manufacturing process but their horse just
didn't come through in time. Since it's
initial debut in November at Comdex,
NVIDIA's Marketing Teams were hard at work positioning
the product and readying strong branding campaigns,
targeted at maximizing the impact of the product in the
market place upon its release. The dates came and
went. Targets were set for a pre-Christmas
delivery but again the GeForce FX was held up, all the
while ATi has been enjoying the spoils.
However, the day is finally drawing
near, when NVIDIA will have their GeForce FX product out
into retail channels in volume. With an extremely
large Heat Sink and Blower attached to the front, it
seems as though the Design Team at NVIDIA has finally
gotten the core stable and ready for prime time.
However, the product will still be in very short supply
for the next few weeks and we are sorry to report to
you, that we still haven't had the opportunity to test
the product in our labs at HotHardware. Instead,
what we've prepared for you today, is a closer look at
some of the hardware specifics of the GeForce FX as well
as the software, drivers and functionality of the
product.
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Specifications & Features of the NVIDIA GeForce
FX |
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Retail specs
confirmed... |
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CLICK ANY IMAGE FOR AN
ENLARGED VIEW
GPU:
- GeForce FX 5800
Ultra -- 500 MHz core
- GeForce FX 5800
-- 400MHz core
- .13u Manufacturing
Process
- 125 Million
Transistors ( 2X GeForce 4)
- 256-Bit GPU
- Flip-Chip BGA
Package with copper interconnects
- 8 Pixel Per Clock (8
Pixel Pipelines)
- 1 TMU Per Pipe (16
Textures per unit)
- 350 Million
Triangles per Second - 3x The Geometry Performance
of a GF4 Ti
- AGP8X (2.1GB/s
bandwidth)
Memory:
- Memory with 1GHz
Data Rate (500MHz DDR)
- GeForce FX 5800
Ultra -- 1GHz Memory Clock
- GeForce FX 5800
-- 800MHz Memory Clock
- 128-Bit "DDRII" Type
- 128MB & 256MB Memory
Capacity
-
3rd.
Generation Lightspeed Memory Architecture
-
48GB/s
Effective bandwidth through the use of compression
techniques (16GB/s actual @ 500MHz)
Features:
- Full DX9 Compliance
- 64-Bit
Floating-Point Color
- 128-Bit
Floating-Point Color
- 2 x 400MHz Internal
RAMDACs
- Long Program length
for Pixel and Vertex Shading
- Conditional
Execution for both Pixel and Vertex
- True Data-Dependant
at Vertex
- Unified Vertex and
Pixel Shading instruction set
- Unified Driver
Architecture
- nView 2.0 -
Multi-Display Technology
- Digital Vibrance
Control 3.0
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We're not
going to comb through all of the above specifications
again for you here. If you would like a good
refresher on the technology, please see
Marco's Debut Article, right here. However, we
now have full confirmation on retail product speed grades
and models. The GeForce FX 5800 Ultra (the card we
expect to have in the lab here for testing very soon) runs
at a 500MHz core clock speed, supported by a 1GHz DDR2
(500MHz Double Data Rate) 128 Bit DRAM subsystem.
The GeForce FX 5800 version has a lower core speed at
400MHz and 800MHz DDR2 Memory. Both cards have 128MB
of on board DDR2 memory and are fully AGP8X capable and
compliant. The GeForce FX 5800 Ultra variant, as you
can see, has an impressive and large heat sink and blower
unit, strapped on top of the GPU and it also makes contact
with the small BGA DDR2 memory chips. We have mixed
emotions about this cooling setup that NVIDIA has designed
for their new flagship card.
On one
hand, this cooling system is an impressively designed
solution that most likely provides fantastic heat transfer
and radiation performance. It's probably one of the
reasons why NVIDIA is able to clock their GPU so high at
500MHz, in the first place. On the other hand, while
it is impressive to look at, it seems to be a much less
elegant and more costly solution, than the standard Heat
Sink and Fan assemblies of more traditional cards on the
market. Also, this cooler consumes an extra PCI slot
location in your chassis, adjacent to the AGP slot it
plugs into. Although this isn't much of a show
stopper, since most folks don't use all PCI slots on a
motherboard these days, it still seems like a waste of
real-estate. Regardless, if you know the way we
think here around HotHardware.com, you'll know that if we
can get even an extra 10MHz speed bump, we'll take it and
good cooling is essential.
More Technology and Technology Demos
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