nVidia GeForce FX5200 (NV34) Video Card Review
Benchmarking Results
Unreal Tournament 2003
FX 5200 lags well behind both to its direct competitor ATI Radeon 9000 and its predecessor - GeForce 4 MX480. ATI Radeon 9000 and nVidia GeForce 4 MX480 demonstrated about the same results.
In the botmatch test, the scores are the same, but the gap between nVidia GeForce FX and ATI Radeon 9000/ nVidia GeForce 4 MX480 has shrunk, although it's not small anyway: 4-8 fps on the average:
Serious Sam The Second Encounter
nVidia GeForce FX lags behind ATI Radeon 9000 and is well behind nVidia GeForce 4 MX480. In this test, nVidia GeForce 4 MX480 wins: it takes the lead over its competitor ATI Radeon 9000 with a fairly wide gap.
3D Mark 2001 SE
nVidia GeForce FX lags behind ATI Radeon 9000 and loses to nVidia GeForce 4 MX480.
3D Mark 2001 Detailed Results
Gaming test 4 - Nature
The benchmarking results for nVidia GeForce FX are practically the same as those for ATI Radeon 9000. The nVidia GeForce 4 MX480 failed to pass the test since it doesn't support pixel shaders.
Fill rate
At fillrate tests, the nVidia GeForce FX 5200 is an evident loser and we were growing doubtful whether FX 5200 video cards are built on the 2x2 pixel pipeline design.
High polygon rate - 8 illumination sources
Again the results are not in favor of nVidia GeForce FX 5200.
Vertex shader speed
At that, nVidia GeForce 4 MX480 is again the leader. The second comes ATI Radeon 9000 and nVidia GeForce FX 5200 the third.
Pixel shader speed
At pixel shaders, nVidia GeForce FX 5200 is doing much better.
Advanced pixel shader speed
There is a mess with results at this test: nVidia GeForce FX 5200 lags well behind its competitor ATI Radeon 9000. The thing is that video cards optimized for DirectX 9 support pixel shaders v.1.4, and if a card does not support v.1.4, then this test uses pixel shaders v.1.1 which require more passes. It's still unclear what caused such results - the drivers or the 3DMark package itself.
Codecreatures
This benchmark uses pixel shaders of the DirectX 8.1 generation. nVidia GeForce FX shows a better progress at DirectX 8.1 than at ATI Radeon 9000 does. The gap is not dramatical, but it's there. nVidia GeForce 4 MX480 does not pass this test at all since it does not support pixel shaders.
Codecreatures - average polygon rate
The test results allow representing and comparing the average speed of polygons handled per second.
Image quality
nVidia GeForce FX 5200 slightly lags behind nVidia GeForce 4 MX480, and all would have looked much better if nVidia GeForce FX 5200 didn't lack IntelliSample engine. We were unable to read the results for ATI Radeon 9000 because of problems with ATI's drivers with Unreal Tournament 2003.
Findings
GeForce FX 5200 left dual impression. On the one hand, the performance about the same as that for GeForce4 MX, sometimes much lower than shown by the competition and the predecessor.
On the other hand, its low price ~90$ (anyway, the price is worth cutting down since cards based on this graphics chip are able competing only with GeForce4 MX è RADEON 9000), good DirectX 9 optimization and excellent pixel handling, albeit not without flaws: test results in the Advanced Pixel Shaders scene point to that, but these are more likely to be driver problems and soon they will be fixed.
All in all, the FX5200 is the same previous MX with improved functionality for DX9 support. But who will buy a weak video card for still non-existent demanding games that require DX9 to watch a slide show in the end? Gamers definitely won't want it - they need more serious solutions, while all the others do not feel a real need for DX9...
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