Gigabyte GV-N595U-GT (NVIDIA FX 5950 Ultra)
Benchmarking Results: Synthetic benchmarks
Following the tradition, we start with our radically amended benchmarking package.
ShaderMark v2.0
The handling of version 2.0 pixel shaders is just a bottleneck for NVIDIA FX video cards. As compared to Sapphire Radeon 9800XT, even the overclocked version of NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra by Gigabyte - Gigabyte GV-N595U-GT being reviewed today cannot compete on par with Sapphire Radeon 9800XT and loses to the latter at handling some shaders in multiple times!
D3D RightMark. Geometry Processing Speed
This test allows assessing the speed at which the geometry is processed by the accelerator. We used the most advanced mode with three diffuse-specular light sources in combination with three different operating modes: the traditional TCL (Fixed-Function Pipeline), version 1.1 vertex shaders and version 1.1 pixel shaders, version 2.0 vertex shaders and pixel shaders, as well as the simplest mode of ambient illumination is also in combination with the three operating modes: the traditional TCL (Fixed-Function Pipeline), vertex shaders 1.1 and pixel shaders 1.1, vertex shaders 2.0 and pixel shaders 2.0. In the case of Ambient illumination (the simplest constant illumination) and transformation we reach the practical limit for the card's bandwidth at processing the triangles.
 Let's look at the test results. As we can see, the NVIDIA chip does a better job at the fixed T&L than ATI Radeon 9800XT due to known reasons. The latter lacks hardware support for the T&L emulation. And 148+ million triangles per second in Gigabyte GV-N595U-GT makes it stand out (the higher frequency of the graphic chip makes itself felt).
In ATI Radeon 9800XT, there is no dependency on the version of the shader used, the chip shows absolutely identical results of peak performance at triangles in all the modes. Albeit insignificantly, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra changes the values of its peak performance.
Let's see how things are with the most complex illumination model: in it there are three diffuse-specular light sources. In the case of the emulation of traditionally old T&L, NVIDIA chips lead as usual, but when migrating to DirectX 8.0 generation shaders the chip become more or less equal. Finally, in using version 2.0 pixel and vertex shaders ATI makes a sharp leap forward. Well, NVIDIA's bottleneck has been known for a long time, and we can only recall the results for NVIDIA boards in this test with old (nor ForceWare) drivers and think that things are not that bad =).
Pixel Filling
This test performs a number of various tasks, but we were mostly interested in the possibility of measuring the performance of frame buffer filling. We used two schemes in this test: both with a 256x256 texture, and without such.
The values of frame-buffer fill-rate produced in this test with the ATI chip do not coincide a bit with the theoretical maximum announced by ATI itself, but with NVIDIA everything is correct for the case of the Texelrate (Color+Z) mode. However, the frame-buffer filling anyway occurs in ATI chip faster than in the NVIDIA chip.
In the case of simultaneous texturing, the alignment of forces doesn't change.
Pixel Shading
This test in the D3D RightMark benchmarking package allows to estimate the performance of executing various pixel shaders of the second version. In this test, the geometry has been substantially simplified to minimize the dependence of results of the test on the geometric performance of the chip and verify the operation of pixel pipelines only. We've brought in the operational modes for both 16-bit and 32-bit floating-point precision (switching between the precision modes is topical for NVIDIA chips only).
NVIDIA chips proved shattered at performing version 2.0 shaders under 32-bit floating-point precision. Yes, we can make reservation for that the ATI chip was running that time at its customary 24-bit precision, but let's look at the fps values produced with 16-bit floating-point precision. In this case, the NVIDIA chip is in a vantage point, since it uses less precision rate than the ATI chip (whose absolute values, as expected, do not change - it runs at its invariable 24-bit).
And again a fiasco. At the results of the test, NVIDIA chip executes pixel programs twice slower than ATI chips do.
Point Sprites
This test is aimed at revealing the accelerator speed at displaying point sprites. In the test settings, we used 2 diffuse light sources.
In the most demanding mode with two diffuse-specular light sources, the ATI chip again beats NVIDIA. Note that the version of the executable shader does not play any part for ATI Radeon 9800XT, while NVIDIA GeForce 5950 Ultra starts lagging behind if version 2.0 vertex shader is used.
Hidden Surface Removal
This test allows to estimate the efficiency of removal of hidden points and primitives by the accelerator.
At that, NVIDIA chip does much better.
Codecreatures
Despite the poor results at handling pixel shaders in NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, we see a leadership of NVIDIA boards. What to say to this? NVIDIA optimizations are used to the full :-).
In the antialiasing mode, the overall picture does not change.
But at the 8x anisotropy ATI demonstrates leadership! Why that happens? The thing is in the specific way the AF algorithms are built in ATI and NVIDIA chips. While ATI uses a more merciful filtering mode, NVIDIA accelerators have to filter out almost every blade of grass in the benchmark.
3DMark 2003 v340
To date, at 3DMark 2003 among the top-end accelerators there is more or less parity, with the reservation that in 1024x768x32 NVIDIA wins due to using the Gigabyte GV-N595U-GT overclocked by the manufacturer. If impartially compared to the NVIDIA reference, then GeForce FX 5950 Ultra made by MSI loses.
There is no difference between Catalyst 4.1 and Catalyst 4.2.
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