Can the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra knock ATI down?

EVER SINCE Nvidia announced the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra it's been known that the card's raw specifications didn't pack the punch it needed to blow the Radeon 9700 Pro away. Exactly how the chips would fall between the two, however, was still a mystery, but if the boys at Tecchanel.de know their stuff, the situation looks pretty bad.

According to our German neighbors, GeForce FX performance is decidedly two-sided. The card performs well in some SPECviewperf 7.0 tests, besting the 9700 Pro by up to 45% in 3ds Max-01, but drops behind the 9700 Pro by 10 fps in dx-07. In 3DMark 2001 SE the GeForce FX wins again, but only by a few hundred points. NVIDIA wins the basic Q3A tests tecchanel.de runs, but the Radeon blows past it once 4XFSAA is enabled. The two cards run dead even in Unreal Tournament 2003. The rest of the benchmarks follow a similar pattern: The FX wins some, the Radeon wins others, but the margin between the two rarely even approaches 10%.

One area where the GeForce FX does blow the 9700 away, however, is power draw. This sucker pulls no less than 75 watts of heat fully functional, almost a full third higher than the Radeon. This translates into a phenomenal amount of heat and explains why the 5800 Ultra carries a small vacuum cleaner around on its back, rather like an overheated snail.

Lets review what we have here: It's half a year late, it takes up a PCI slot, sucks an enormous amount of power, runs extremely hot, and at last report, sounds like a Dustbuster, performs competitively with ATI's six-month-old Radeon 9700 Pro, and is expected to retail for $499 in the US or approximately 650 Euros in the EU. This isn't exactly a winning combination.

Its possible Nvidia will once again reach into their driver bag and pull out a new set of Detonators magically unlocking an additional 10-15% performance from the 5800. It's even possible that the boys at Tecchannel.de are wrong, or got a sub-standard card.

But if none of these three occur, Nvidia is in serious trouble. It's hard to argue the 5800 is all that competitive at its current price, and RV350 is on the way. It looks like ATI's seizing of the graphics card throne was no fluke. Nvidia may be able to claim the performance crown by a hair, but the days of an Nvidia GeForce-release effortlessly sailing by ATI's just-released product (as happened with the original Radeon and Radeon 8500) appear to be long gone. µ