Every six month product cycle, the battle for the “best buy” graphics card is renewed.  During the last cycle, nVidia won with their Geforce4 Ti4200 which combined good performance with a price that many enthusiasts could live with.  nVidia hopes to keep that important market niche with their FX5600 cards.  Like the FX5900 Ultra, the FX5600 includes all the future-proofing DirectX 9+ features of its more expensive brethren while having an acceptable price for most budget minded people. 

With a new product cycle, brings new features.  Image quality has become somewhat a new movement in the graphics card industry ever since 3dfx started this emphasis with their Voodoo5 5500.  High frame rates are no longer the coveted holy grail, but rather high frame rates with good image quality.  This is clearly reflected by the stress nVidia has placed on the new feature-set and the nomenclature used to describe these features in the new FX cards.   

The CineFX engine can be considered the flagship-feature of the FX series centering upon numerous enhancements on vertex and pixel shaders.  Both receive a designation of 2.0+, trying to show that nVidia’s implementation of both exceeds Microsoft’s DirectX 9 specification while ATi’s R3X0 cores only meet the specification.  Vertex shader 2.0+ adds support for a greater amount of instructions allowing programmers to have greater flexibility.  Pixel shader 2.0+ most notably supports pixel shader programs with a maximum of 1024 instructions (up from 64 found in 2.0).  Finally pixel shader support both 64bit and 128bit floating point precision allowing rendered images to look more realistic.   

Just as Accuview brought image enhancements to the Geforce4 line, Intellisample does the same for the FX based cards.  It encompasses filtering technologies such as trilinear and anisotropic filtering, color compression, gamma correction, and anti-aliasing (introducing two new modes: 6XS and 8X).  What does all of this some-what technical mumbo-jumbo mean for the average person?  Hopefully better image quality without a large if any performance hit so your America’s Army (or whatever game you happen to play) looks good without frame-rates going down the drain.    

With the features out of the way, we can talk about the FX5600 GPU specifically.  Like many of nVidia’s lower tier graphics cards, the FX5600 is basically a crippled version of its more expensive family – and in this case the number of pipelines has been reduced in half from eight to four, the GPU can only apply one texture per pass, core and memory speeds reduced, a 128bit DDRI memory bus rather than the FX5900’s 256bit DDRII bus.

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Albatron FX5600EQ

Given that, some of us also are speed demons that demand that extra 3.4 FPS on Quake III, and if you are, go buy yourself the Radeon 9800 Pro with all the fixings. Enough said.

Assuming that you are of the former group, I will walk you through a guide that compares different cards in the same price range as well as provide you with a great reference table in order to overview which cards leave you with the chips, and which ones leave you giving up your pants as an IOU.

Note: All prices are using the Pricewatch.com price query engine as of August 03, 2003. The performance is not scientific or benchmarked, but just a general “feel” of how smoothly the card runs. The system that the card is applied to is assumed a Pentium 4 1.6 GHz with 256 Megs of RAM.

Jacks or Better (less than $40.00 USD)

The dilemma: you have only the spare change that you found in your jogging shoes, your parent’s wallets, your uncle’s social security fund, etc. You need to replace your “Intel Integrated Video” and you have a very limited amount of money. Here are your options:

• Geforce4 MX 440 64 MB. ($37)
  This card comes with a lot of online OEMs and is very popular because of its GeForce4 pedigree and it’s low price. However, I must let you know that this is not really a GeForce4 – it’s a somewhat glorified GeForce2. Besides the GeForce2 performance, you will also suffer from bad OpenGL support and a lack of resell value. This card can barely handle most recent FPS games at near-minimal detail settings.


• 3dfx VooDoo3 ($20)
  For those truly willing to sacrifice performance for money, this card is great for the money you pay. Many enthusiasts still have drivers available on their web sites and most games support this card. Now for the downside: Sub-Geforce2 performance and limited support of more recent DirectX versions. That, and the company is no longer existent (it was acquired by nVidia), so don’t expect too much tech support help.


• Radeon 7500 ($39)
  This card is slightly more expensive than it’s Geforce4 nemesis (a whole two dollars) but it also performs better in 2D. In 3D, the card falls slightly behind the Geforce4 and the difference in clock speeds between the two cards is very noticeable here.


• TNT2 32 MB. ($22)
  This card is the low of the low, even when seated next to the lacking VooDoo3. However, this card is a great choice for Linux gaming as many popular, and even older, Linux distributions contain excellent support for the TNT2. As far as Windows gaming goes, don’t expect too much, but you should be able to play your Medal of Honor without too much trouble.

The Winner: GeForce4 MX 440 64 MB.
While it is over-rated and somewhat of an under performer, it does manage to beat all of the other cards in performance and is widely available. Also, you probably can find someone on eBay or a friend who can sell it to you for much cheaper. Your best bet is really to save up your money and buy a better card, but if you really need one now, this is the way to go.

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Aces High – Which Video Cards Win the Pot?

To say that I am excited about this card would be an understatement.  Not since the days of the Voodoo5 5500 have we had a serious contender for the NVIDIA speed crown.  Don’t get me wrong, I love NVIDIA’s products, and own several of them; but serious competition only makes the market better for all of us.  The Radeon 8500 was a valiant attempt, but in the end NVIDIA was able to out muscle the 8500 with the newer GeForce4 series of cards.  This time, it looks like ATI has accomplished their goal, and in a convincing fashion.  Not content to be equal to the NVIDIA cards, the Radeon 9700 Pro smashes the GeForce4 Ti4600 in nearly every benchmark, and has established ATI as the leader in the high-end video market.

The Radeon 9700 Pro is the latest in the Radeon series from ATI, boasting a wide array of new advanced features and technology.  This card is targeted at the high-end gamer, challenging the GeForce4 Ti4600 for top honors.  We are not talking budget cards here, this is the balls to the wall, framerate at all costs segment of the market.  Before we get into the performance numbers and charts, let us have a look at what features the Radeon 9700 Pro brings to the table.

The Radeon 9700 Pro is based on the R300 GPU, boasting more than 110 million transistors.  The GPU uses a .15m process like its predecessor the Radeon 8500, and the rival GeForce4 series.  The Radeon is AGP 8X capable, although there have been issues with some of the 8X motherboards on the market which we will cover later in the review.  The new GPU includes full support for the yet to be released DirectX 9, meaning that there is nothing this card cannot do, now and into the holiday season.  Memory bandwidth is an amazing 20 GB/sec, besting even the mighty GeForce4 Ti4600’s 10.4 GB/sec by a wide margin.  Eight pixel-rendering pipelines, with one texture unit per pipeline are capable of rendering up to 16 textures per pass, easily surpassing the 4-texture per pass abilities of the Ti4600. 

A 256-bit DDR memory interface, utilizing Hyper Z III technology fights the memory bottleneck issue prevalent in modern video cards.  For those of you not up on  PR terminology, Hyper Z III is ATI’s way of analyzing and eliminating overdraw.  We know that as an image is rendered on the screen, the video card typically textures and renders every forward facing pixel, that is, any pixel that faces the viewer.  With the complex scenes of the modern video games, many of these pixels were hidden behind other objects, and the overhead used to render them was completely wasted.  You may recall the Kyro II’s tile-based rendering, which eased the burden of overdraw, giving the card a significant speed boost.  While the Radeon 9700 Pro does not use Tile-Based rendering, it does perform calculations on each pixel to determine it’s relationship to the z-axis, and can thereby determine if the pixel will be visible or not.  If we cannot see it, the card does not waste precious time rendering it.

SmartShader 2.0 technology gives the 9700 Pro programmable pixel and vertex shaders, allowing nearly limitless visual effects.  The new Vertex Shader allows for up to 1024 instructions in a single pass, and the Pixel Shader is now capable of 160 instructions per pass.  These new advances give the 9700 Pro the ability to render extremely realistic scenes and textures.  Developers can now use realistic fur, shadow volume, extremely detailed lighting, and even varying properties of material across a single surface.  Of course, this is just a partial list of the new features, and most of the terminology means little to us, so just think amazing graphics.  Programmable shaders are what make a GPU truly a Graphical Processing Unit, unlike early attempts at GPUs in the first GeForce cards.  These second generation GPUs allow the developers to actually create their own effects, rather than choose from a predefined set of effects created by the GPU manufacturer.

ATI’s Smoothvision Anti-Aliasing technology has been improved, bringing the Radeon 9700 Pro to version 2.0.  Along with the Anti-Aliasing, the Radeon 9700 Pro is capable of 2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x Anisotropic Filtering.  This technology adds clarity to the distant textures, and removes that muddy image quality often seen on the horizons and edges of a rendered scene.  Like Anti-Aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering is the latest in a long line of image quality improvements introduced to the video scene.  It is nice to see emphasis shifting from raw framerate to image quality and speed, something pioneered by 3dfx with the Voodoo5 5500 and FSAA.

TruForm 2.0 delivers high order surfaces, making smoother, more realistic rounded shapes and higher poly count models.  According to the ATI website, this can be done without the need to change existing artwork.  A true rounded surface would be the holy grail of computer modeling, at least as far as games are concerned, and TruForm is an attempt to resolve this issue.  Imagine a game world where the character heads are really round and not mishapen lumps straight out of 9th grade geometry class.  This is especially true for flight sim, where image quality is one of the main selling points for a title.

For the PC home theater guys, ATI has you covered, too.  The 9700’s new VideoShader technology is designed remove the blockiness normally seen in video and streaming media.  Using the power of the pixel shaders, the VideoShader can make visible improvements in video playback.  The second feature aimed at video playback is the Fullstream technology.  Here is the ATI definition: FULLSTREAM™ video de-blocking technology that removes blocky artifacts (noise removal filtering) for captured video and provides sharper image quality.  Together, the results are an improved image quality for video playback.  Maybe we could finally see the integration of the PC into the living room entertainment center?  Sounds like a future project for our staff.

Hydravision makes an appearance on the Radeon 9700.  The ablility for a card to utilize multiple displays is quickly becoming a required feature, although many users never even connect the second display.  We’ve used it for presentations and for flight sim titles, and it can be quite useful.  The Radeon 9700 Pro can output to two separate devices, and allows the refresh rate to be set differently on each device.  ATI includes a DVI to VGA adapter to run two standard monitors should you not own a flat panel display.  S-Video out is available as a third option.

Before we skip to the main feature listing from the ATI website, here is a comparison chart of the major players in the current graphics market.  At least on paper, the Radeon 9700 Pro should destroy anything else on the shelf.  Of course, we have seen the cards not live up to the papers, so check out the benchmarks before you make any assumptions.

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ATI Radeon 9700 Pro

TNT2 Ultra the Abit way

Abit is known as one of the premier motherboard makers in the world. Most of us have at least some fond memories of our first SoftMenu experience…ahh the joys of overclocking. As the 3D market has shifted, Nvidia found itself in a unique position. They were the last major chipmaker that had not merged with a board maker. In my opinion, this was fantastic for the gaming community. Suddenly, dozens of smaller, relatively unknown companies stepped in to fill the void left by the likes of Diamond and STB. Eventually, Asus, Gigabyte, and now Abit entered the game. Why is this so great for gamers? How many variants of the Voodoo3 have you seen? Three to be exact, all made by the same company. Try searching Pricewatch for a TNT2 and see how many cards turn up. There is a nearly endless number of cards to choose from, TV-out, Digital flat panel out, 16MB, 32MB, M64, Vanta, just to name a few. With the addition of the Abit Siluro line of cards, gamers now have a name that is known and trusted to spend their hard earned cash on. Abit was gracious enough to send Maximum3D one of their TNT2 Ultra boards for torture and testing. Do these video cards share the same level of quality and reliability that is synonymous with the name Abit?

Siluro GT2 Specs

-nVidia TNT2 128-bit 3D Graphics and Video Accelerator
-Full AGP 4X, sideband / pipelined transfers:
66MHz AGP clock rate bursting at 266 mega transfers per second
-Supports over 900MB/s in AGP 4X mode
-32 MB SDRAM
-Triple 8-bit 300Mhz Palette DAC
-15-pin D-sub VGA
-S-Video mini-DIN (S-Video out)
-Digital Flat Panel connector

Basically, it is a standard TNT2 board, that has the same look as the Abit mainboards, no green PCB here. There is a low profile fan/heatsink installed on the chip, and it allows for some pretty serious overclocking which will be discussed later in the review. Abit has even reinforced the mounting bracket to prevent it from bending.

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Abit Siluro GT2 Ultra