Contents

Introduction
Compare the Cards - compare the 5800, 5600 and 5200
Chipset Details
Shaders - Changes in the pixel and vertex shaders
CineFX Engine - The Main Driving force behind the Geforce FX
Intellisample - Nvidia's new Antialiasing techniques.
DDR-II - Improvement Graphics memory
ThePanther Says - Our views on the Geforce FX
Product Specs - Quick run down of the tech specs
Useful Links - Drivers, more info, price comparisons and buying the Geforce FX

CineFX Engine

The CineFX engine is the part of the card that is responsible for making the images on your games as real as possible. You can expect life like explosions, scenery that looks like you are at the cinema, Nvidia's Cinematic experience. There are many ways in which the Geforce FX achieves this. The Pixel and Vertex shaders are now much more advanced. For example the Pixel shaders can now handle 1024 instructions on a single pass allowing for much more depth in detail on each pixel. Items that would normally have low detail levels such as hair or grass or smoke scenes for example will be much more realistic with the Geforce fx. Take a look at this screenshot from Nvidia's demo. See the detail in the skin and hair. As programmers get the utilize these features more and more, games will become more realistic and more detailed than ever before. Like Nvidia says, it will be a cinematic experience.

Intellisample

Intellisample is the anti-aliasing technology in the Geforce FX. There are differences in this from the other anti-aliasing technologies. Firstly the Geforce FX can be run in 6XS mode doing 50% more samples than the previous 4XS mode. This gives even smoother edges than in previous cards. Now for the even better news, as higher sample rates gives smoother edges it also takes a performance hit. This is because the image is sampled at a higher resolution and then scaled down to your monitor resolution. Nvidia claim that this is a thing of the past. A lossless z-buffer and colour compression technology allow the Geforce FX to give better image quality through the established anti-aliasing methods without the usual performance hits.

From Nvidia - Intellisample also incorporates the most advanced anisotropic filtering available. When a textured surface is close to edge-on with your viewpoint, the detail and accuracy of that texture drops drastically. NVIDIA's proprietary anisotropic filtering eliminates this distortion adaptively by determining how extensive distortion is likely to be, and applying its filtering muscle proportionally, so you get every last drop of quality and performance possible.

DDR-II

When DDR memory was introduced it was the best thing to hit the DRAM business. I simple bit of logic which sent a data signal on both the rise and fall of a signal effectively doubled the data rate of the memory, hence DDR (Double Data Rate). DDR-II had to be something different. And again it was something to you and I was very simple but very difficult to implement. DRAM manufacturers found ways of being able to double the clock speed of the memory. Simple you say as this has been done in almost every component for years. True but with current problems in DDR-1 not reaching higher speeds it was harder than first thought. In terms of the card all you need to know is that the DDR-II memory is twice as fast as DDR-1. If you would like to go more in depth on this subject there is a good article at Lost Circuits here.

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Every time a new card comes on the market its always faster, it has more memory and it will blow away the competition again :). Well the Nvidia Geforce FX is faster by quite a mile than the current competition. However I'm not going to talk too much about that, the main thing we are looking at with the Geforce FX is the image quality. Quality has always been ATI side of the graphics card industry while Nvidia gave you raw power and fps. Now Nvidia have come up with the CineFX engine which can give you a cinematic experience with real time effects and very high quality detail without the performance hit.

With this in mind you are looking at an all rounder in the graphics card industry., It can perform on games image work and be a perfect Desktop graphics card even for a simple home user as it has the 5200 version with some of the more advanced featured cut off. It still has all the old favourites such as Nview and Anti-aliasing. The 5600 Ultra although very fast didn't quite beat ATI's Flagship of the time the Radeon 9800 Pro. Nvidia have however hit back with its release of the FX5900 Ultra.

Product Specs.

Useful Links

PCMall.com U.S. Visitors can buy here

Other Graphics card reviews.

Looking for the Geforce 4 ? Then you should be looking at the Geforce 4 Ti range. The Ti range offers more speed, more features and more quality. Not to mention the whopping great 128Mb of DDR RAM on everyone of the Geforce 4 Ti range. Featuring twin vertex shaders Lightspeed memory architecture II Accuview Anti-aliasing, NView and more. Click here for more information

The Radeon 9700 Pro from ATI is the only real challenger to the Geforce FX  at current times  featuring its own batch of technologies such as the Hyper-Z and smoothvision II. 8 rendering pipelines as well as a fast core clock and DDR memory. The Radeon 9700 pro is fully DirectX 9.0 compliant and is dropping in price every month. Well worth a look into. Read More...