Digital-Daily : Video : gigabyte-n595u-gt

Gigabyte GV-N595U-GT (NVIDIA FX 5950 Ultra)

Date: 24.02.2004

FarCry Demo

Running tests with new games appearing on the market is always exciting. First, it's always interesting (and necessary) to estimate the speed of graphic boards against the latest developments of the industry; secondly, it's interesting to see why you should fork out your 400 "evergreen" bucks for a latest Hi-end board if nothing else can be run with it except 3DMark 2003 to feast your eyes upon shader technologies :).

The game FarCry is a bright example of what we can expect from Hi-End boards with support for DirectX 9.0. The beauty demonstrated in this albeit raw demo version (even though released officially) gives cause for thinking about the necessity of buying a hi-end graphic accelerator, because you can see the real prospects of using such products in practice already now.

We ran tests with one of our own demos (3Dnews004 Demo) which is a fly-about above a part of the island where all the action in the FarCry demo takes place. We had to give up testing with the demo recorded by us which imitated the gaming process in FarCry Demo because such demos are incorrectly played. They suffer from numerous bugs like disappearing models of the enemies, no shooting and other annoying things which prevent from taking 100% identical readings from all the boards. However, you can also get a good idea of the performance level of the game with the demo 3Dnews004, as well as the inconsistency of performance results among the top-end boards by ATI and NVIDIA.

In this demo, we used a special patch dubbed "WaterFix" to solve the problem of reflection of various objects in the water, because this option remains disabled in the demo version of FarCry. On the screenshots above you can clearly see the difference between the "unpatched" version of FarCry Demo (left) and the "patched" one (right). Of course, this innovation will affect the performance, however, we have a right to expect the best image quality from Hi-end boards with their fabulous price.

Traditionally, all the settings are set to the maximum possible level ("Very High") except the texture quality settings - the demo version has a restriction on their quality to the "Medium" level, and it's impossible to enable the higher detail level. Most likely, it is caused by the developers' intention to reduce the size of the distribution package, so the maximum-quality textures were not included in the demo version but for the medium-quality textures.

We were unable to run tests in the antialiasing and anisotropic filtering modes, since the game does not respond to forcing any image quality improvement techniques manually out of the driver, but the use of special console commands ("d3d9_Texture_Filter_Anisotropic 1" and "r_Texture_Anisotropic_Level X", where X - the number of anisotropy samples, and "r_FSAA 1" + " r_FSAA_samples X", where X - the number of antialiasing samples ) to enable, say, the antialiasing, produces a great number of artifacts, which makes it impossible not only to run the tests, but the gaming process as well. Let's wait for the official version of the game.

Anyway, let's look at the test results. So, what can we see now? Frankly, we expected a more pessimistic scenario of behavior for NVIDIA boards in this test. Yes, - ATI Radeon 9800XT is an undisputable leader of this test. Tracing the dynamics of resolution rise, we see that as the resolution goes up, the gap also widens (we were able to see that many times in all the tests most demanding to the graphic subsystem of the computer).

On the other hand,in the most playable resolution 1024x768x32 NVIDIA and ATI boards go abreast. And Gigabyte GV-N595U-GT even leaps forward thus justifying the name of the fastest board built on the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra chip.

As we see, shaders are again still a hard nut to crack to NVIDIA chips, but anyway the progress is there. What is it about? Of course, the architectural problems of the GeForce FX haven't gone anywhere. Most likely, the game developers did quite a global work on optimizing the game engine for the architectural specifics of NVIDIA boards, since FarCry is a participant of NVIDIA's "The way it`s meant to be played" initiative.

Final Words

Well, it's high time we summed it all up. Today, we've had an unusual testing session in many ways. A number of new tests, the change of the test configuration, as well as reorganization of many tests... By the totals of comparison of the latest solutions by NVIDIA and ATI, we still can't name a one-one leader in the Hi-End niche. We can safely assert an approximate parity (by the total number of tests passed) in old applications which do not use shaders of the DirectX 9.0 generation. At that, the boards show approximate parity in the total. In shader games of the latest generation, all is not so straightforward. If the game developers worked quite closely on the adaptation of the game for the architectural specifics of NVIDIA boards, then things with speed for NVIDIA are more or less good. If such approach was not practiced, then purely shader games will run faster with boards built on ATI Radeon chips. Proceeding from this reasoning, as well as considering the prices for the products, the buyer would have to choose between Hi-end boards.

The current alignment of forces between ATI Radeon 9800XT and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra presented in this material should preserve until the release of new solutions by ATI and NVIDIA. Sure, there are persistent rumors about ForceWare2, but these are still rumors =).

Regarding the Gigabyte GV-N595U-GT Video Card. Leaving out the quite costly solution of Gainward's offering water cooling (i.e. rather nonstandard and unusual for the mainstream market), in today's review we have tested the currently fastest board built on NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra whose graphic chips is able running safely at 520 MHz versus standard 475 MHz in all the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra boards. Basing on the test results, this of course brings advantages, but they will make sense provided the prices for boards are reasonable and sane. In all the other respects, the board demonstrated the best of its showing. The package bundle was also up to the mark. So, if you are looking for a board based on NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra that is able running safely at higher clock speeds of the core, and if you are not confused by the higher price, then Gigabyte GV-N595U-GT is the right board for you.

The Gigabyte GV-N595U-GT video card for tests was granted by Gigabyte
Sapphire Radeon 9800XT was presented by Sapphire Technology

VGA Roundup `2003:

NVIDIA VGA Roundup `2003

ATI VGA Roundup `2003

Gigabyte GV-N595U-GT (NVIDIA FX 5950 Ultra)

FarCry Demo

Final Words

VGA Roundup `2003:

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