Released around early 2003, the new
Geforce FX range provides the greatest performance of any Geforce range yet, making full use of the new
Direct X 9, advanced
Open GL rendering functions, and even the new
DDR-II, Geforce has thrown a punch back at
ATI to combat their
Radeon 9800 Pro. Geforce fell short with their "
budget" models, but the new Geforce FX 5900 blows the Radeon 9800 Pro out of the water.
Geforce FX Series
5200
The 5200 is the cheapest card in the series. Providing average performance for an average price, the card is reliable and silent in its cooling. It sports the CineFX Engine, nView technology, AGP 8x, and the following stats:
Graphics Core: 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth: 10.4GB/sec.
Fill Rate: 1.3 billion texels/sec.
Vertices per Second: 81 million/sec.
Maximum Memory: 128MB
5600
The price increase between the 5200 and the 5600 is fairly significant, but the performance isn't. The major advantage of this range is the more memory available, now being able to reach 256 MB of DDR DRAM. It sports the CineFX Engine, Intellisample technology, nView technology, AGP 8x and the following stats:
Graphics Core: 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth: 12.8GB/sec.
Fill Rate: 1.6 billion texels/sec.
Vertices per Second: 100 million
Maximum Memory: 256MB
5900 Inferno
The 5900 Inferno might cost an arm and a leg, but it could render an arm and a leg for you so realistically that you wouldn't mind! This card is an absolute beast, but it roars like one so if you don't like noise, better pass this one up. Supporting all the very latest technology and utilising DDR-II, the Radeon 9000 Pro is left behind in the dust. Sporting the CineFX 2.0 Engine, Intellisample HCT, nView technology, Ultra Shadow, AGP 8x and the following stats:
Graphics Core: 256-bit
Memory Interface: 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth: 27.2GB/sec
Fill Rate: 3.6 billion texels/sec.
Vertices/sec.: 338 million
Memory Data Rate: 850MHz
Pixels per Clock (peak): 8
Textures per Pixel: 16*
RAMDACs: 400MHz
*Maximum in a single rendering pass with 8 textures applied per clock.
Geforce FX Go Series
5200
nVidia refuses to display the stats for their Go series, and I don't blame them, because they are the worst they have produced yet. The 5200 is dismal, and it doesn't even begin to contest the Radeon 9200M. I managed to find the following comparison:
GeForce Go 5200 Radeon 9200M
3D Mark 2001 6579 Marks 7534 Marks
3D Mark 2003 871 Marks 1222 Marks
UT 2003 62 FPS 87 FPS
nVidia suggests that the 3D Mark 2003 benchmark test is "incompatible" with the GeForce Go 5200, but I can only see one reason why: because it performs so badly on it. As you can see, it's a dismal comparisson and doesn't even begin to challenge the 9200M. Nevertheless, if you were to buy the 5200 rather than the 9200M (perhaps because the 5200 is much cheaper), you might want to know that it sports the CineFX Engine, nView technology, VPE, Powermizer, AGP 8x and the following stats:
Number of transistors: 60 millions.
Production process: 0.15 micrometers
Chip clock: up to 300 MHz
GDR clock: 300 MHz
GDR memory capacity: max. 256 MB
Pixel pipelines: 4
Memory interface: 128-bits
Tension (Vcore): 1.2 Volts
5600
More transistors, more power (in most models) and more cost. Not much more performance. The 5600 is even worse than the 5200, and as you can imagine falls well short of the Radeon 9600M. It sports the CineFX engine, Intellisample technology, nView technology, VPE, Powermizer, AGP 8x and the following stats:
Number of transistors: 80 millions.
Production process: 0.13 micrometers
Chip clock: up to 350 MHz
GDR clock: 350 MHz
GDR memory capacity: max. 256 MB
Pixel pipelines: 4
Memory interface: 128-bits
Tension (Vcore): 1.0 to 1.25 Volts
Geforce Quadro FX Series
500
Where the FX and FX Go series is dedicated to 3D OpenGL Graphics rendering, the Quadro series is dedicated to 2D CAD and 3D DirectDraw rendering. The 500 is cheap, and it has cheap stats to boot:
AGP: 8X
Graphics Pipeline: 128-bit
proe-02: 16.8
ugs-03: 12.2
3dsmax-02: 12.1
1000
A relatively small jump in price, but a large jump in performance. For the middle income earner, the Quadro FX 1000 is the best choice:
AGP: 8X
Graphics Pipeline: 128-bit
proe-02: 33.1
ugs-03: 33.1
3dsmax-02: 22.4
1500
As with all top of the line GeForce products, the price hike is large, but the performance isn't improved enough to warrant most people rushing out to buy it over the much more moderately priced 1000 model:
AGP: 8X
Graphics Pipeline: 128-bit
proe-02: 39.4
ugs-03: 42.0
3dsmax-02: 24.6
Overall
Like you have your Intel and AMD people, you have your Geforce and your ATI people. I am a stalwart Geforce person, and like always I chose to stick with them and purchased the Geforce FX 5600 256 MB. I get good performance with it, and I am quite happy, but in reality the FX series is a big dissapointment for nVidia. The FX range might be worth it, the Go range most definently isn't, but the Quadro range is quite reliable. Still, they could have done much better, but they didn't and ATI is once again the king of graphics cards for the time being. nVidia have much to improve for their next range.
Sources:
http://www.nvidia.com
http://www.ati.com
http://www.theinquirer.org/?article=8836
http://www.chip.de/news/c_news_10075740.html