Introduction:

Some time has passed since we have last seen a new video card from nVidia. Their last top of the line product was released over 6 months ago, and only got a small "upgrade" just recently. The Geforce 4 Ti4600 (Ti4800 in the shops now, a Ti4600 with AGP 8x support) was the fastest video card available at the time of its release. But the competition was not idling either, only a few months later ATI released the Radeon 9700 Pro. The Radeon series had already tried to take over the performance crown from nVidia before, but the Radeon 8500 just fell short of a victory against the Geforce 3 Ti500. But in the last quarter of 2002 ATI struck back and scored a win with the Radeon 9700 Pro. It blew the competition away with high performance and great image quality, the driver support team of ATI also chipped in and released a unified driver package (much like nVidia's detonator drivers) to deliver error free gaming pleasures to the masses.

Geforce FX 5800 Ultra

Since then the world has been waiting for the reaction of nVidia. When they announced their Geforce FX and its specifications a lot of people believed that they had a winner on their hands. Let’s take a look at those specs:

Graphics chip: NV30

Manufacturing: 0.13-micron

Number of transistors: ~125 million

GPU clock: 500 MHz

Memory clock: 1000 MHz / 15.6 GB/s

Pixel Pipelines/Pixel Fill rate: 4 / 2000 MP/s

Ramdac: (2) 400 MHz

Memory size: 128 MB

Memory type : 128-bit, DDR-II

You instantly notice the insane high memory clock! DDR II technology delivers blistering fast memory and high bandwidth for the Geforce FX. The GPU clock has also been "upgraded" to an impressive 500Mhz!
On paper this card is the best thing around, AGP 8x support, 2x 400Mhz RAMdac for superior 2D performance and quality, support for almost all DX9 features.

Radeon 9700 Pro

What does the Radeon 9700 Pro have to counter this, a quick recap of its well known specs:

Graphics chip: R300

Manufacturing: 0.15-micron

Number of transistors: ~110 million

GPU clock: 325 MHz

Memory clock: 310 MHz / 19.8 GB/s

Pixel Pipelines/Pixel Fill rate: 8 / 2600 MP/s

Ramdac: (2) 400 MHz

Memory size: 128 MB

Memory type : 256-bit, DDR

Although both the GPU and Memory clocks are a lot lower then those of the Geforce FX, it still manages to deliver an impressive 19.8 GB/s bandwidth for the memory!

Geforce 4 Ti4200

In this article I'll be comparing the Geforce FX to the older Geforce 4 Ti4200 (64Mb version) and see if it is worth upgrading. The Specs sheet for the GF4 Ti4200 64Mb:

Graphics chip: NV25

Manufacturing: 0.15-micron

Number of transistors: ~63 million

GPU clock: 250 MHz

Memory clock: 500 MHz / 8 GB/s

Pixel Pipelines/Pixel Fill rate: 4 / 900 MP/s

Ramdac: (2) 350 MHz

Memory size: 64 MB

Memory type : 128-bit, DDR

Modest specifications that should normally give you okay performance in everyday gaming.

Read on to find out how Gainward delivers their version of the Geforce FX…