Nvidia returns fire

Nvidia has taken the wraps off its latest updates to the GeForce FX graphics card family, the $499 GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and the $199 GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. Both of these DirectX 9 cards are expected to be available as soon as next week.

The 5700 Ultra is a major reworking of the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra released early this year, introducing efficiencies similar to those Nvidia added to its high-end line in the transition from the GeForce FX 5800 to the 5900, which was released this early summer. The 128MB 5700 Ultra is the first .13-micron Nvidia chip produced in partnership with IBM and it hits very high clockspeeds for a mid-range card, coming in at 475MHz for the core and 450MHz for the memory. The 5700 Ultra is a four-pipeline card with 128-bit memory, which, at the same MHz rating, makes for about half the raw power as the high-end cards in the GeForce FX family.

Nvidia's new flagship card is the 256MB 5950 Ultra, which benefits from a small bump in speed over the 5900 Ultra. Nvidia's previous high-end card already needed a large dual-slot fan and heat sink to keep it cool at the high 450MHz speeds, but the new card's 25MHz speed boost hasn't made it any louder. And with 256-bit memory, the card has lots of memory bandwidth--more than 30GB per second.

The GeForce FX fall refresh is accompanied by a major driver release, and the release 50 drivers mark a switch in Nvidia's software naming scheme, from Detonator to ForceWare. The ForceWare v52.16 drivers are now available and add new compiler technology that optimizes DirectX and OpenGL code for GeForce FX chips on the fly. Using automatic methods similar to how compilers adapt for different CPU architectures, Nvidia's unified compiler feature reorders low-level operations for enhanced performance without changing the visual results.

The new cards are the latest introduction to a highly competitive graphics card market, and it's expected that the GeForce FX 5900 cards will drop in price to fill the gap between the new cards. ATI, Nvidia's main competitor, recently revised its own performance graphics cards, the $199 Radeon 9600 XT and the $499 Radeon 9800 XT.