The Gigabyte GV-N595U 256MB (at least at this point of time) is an exact replica of the NVIDIA reference board and is in fact made by NVIDIA, save for the Gigabyte logo on the huge fan unit. These high-end graphics cards are very complex to manufacture and very few other vendors have the capability to design, manufacture and maintain the high standards required.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) will host a conference call to discuss its financial results for the fourth quarter and the fiscal year ending January 25, 2004 on February 12, 2004 at 2:00 PM, Pacific Time. The Company's prepared remarks will be followed by a question and answer period, which will be limited to questions from analysts and institutional investors.

To listen to the conference call, please dial 706-679-0543; no password is required. The conference call will also be webcast live (listen-only mode) at the following websites: www.nvidia.com and www.streetevents.com. You must have a compatible media player installed on your computer in order to listen to the webcast. You may download a media player for free at the sites listed above.

The press release announcing the Company's results will be distributed over a national wire service prior to the conference call. The press release will also be posted at the Company's website: www.nvidia.com.

Available immediately in Intel Pentium4/Xeon based HP workstations, the Quadro NVS 280 PCI is a small form-factor, dual-head graphics board that can act as the main graphics head for PCI-only systems, or in combination with other PCI and AGP 8X boards, drive up to 16 high-resolution digital flat panels from a single computer. The Quadro NVS 280 PCI features a single, high-density DMS-59 connector, which provides tremendous flexibility for dual-analog and/or 1600x1200-resolution digital flat panels.

"NVIDIA continues its unwavering commitment to multi-display customers with the introduction of the NVIDIA Quadro NVS 280 PCI," said Jeff Brown, general manager of workstation products at NVIDIA. "NVIDIA now offers a complete line of AGP and PCI-based dual and quad-display NVIDIA Quadro NVS products. In combination with our nView multi-display environment, this product family continues to offer superior graphics performance and value to corporate users, regardless of system platform."

NVIDIA nView software allows NVIDIA Quadro NVS 280 PCI users to spread their work across multiple displays instead of stacking window upon window on one monitor. Professionals can section off displays with gridlines to organize windows, gain quicker access to hidden windows using transparencies in applications such as Microsoft Outlook, and maximize desktop real estate by enabling up to 32 individual Microsoft Windows® desktops.

"NVIDIA continues to bring groundbreaking graphics hardware and software to the professional 2D market," said Jim Zafarana, vice president and worldwide marketing manager, Workstation Business Unit, HP. "HP is able to deliver world-renowned image quality, compatibility, and stability to our customers, by working with partners like NVIDIA who are consistently on the forefront of graphics innovation with products like the NVIDIA Quadro NVS 280 PCI."

NVIDIA tests NVS solutions with all major financial and corporate applications, commonly used analog and digital displays, and peripherals with the goal of zero down-time to professionals. NVIDIA UDA, the single unified driver for all NVIDIA graphics products, ensures high performance and image quality with a set of backward-and-forward, top-to-bottom compatible graphics drivers that makes large-scale system deployment and unattended installations easy.

NVIDIA Quadro add-in card partners such as PNY (US and Europe), LeadTek (Asia/Pacific), and Elsa (Japan), as well as value-added resellers and system builders worldwide, are also now selling the Quadro NVS 280 PCI.

Goldman Sachs noted that NVIDIA lost share in the key market for stand-alone graphics parts for PCs, while ATI posted gains in that segment.

"As a reminder, our thesis remains that (ATI) will eventually equal (Nvidia's) share on the desktop thanks to the roughly equivalent performance of its products and its newly forged relationships with a number of key add-in board partners such as Asustek and Microstar," Goldman analyst Andrew Root said in a note.

"We do however think there is additional downside risk to Nvidia estimates for (the fiscal first quarter and fiscal second quarter) given the unexpected gap in share gains in notebooks," he said. Nvidia lost less than one percentage point of share in the December quarter, though Root said he had been expecting the company to make gains instead.

NVIDIA NV40

• 175 million transistors, in 130nm manufactured
• 8x2 architecture, however 16 Z/Stencil tests per clock
• DirectX 9,0 architecture, supports Shader 3.0
• opposite NV38 and Shader doubled more efficient pixels
• supports DDR1, GDDR2 and GDDR3
• internal AGPx8 interface
• exact clock rates: unknown; there is estimated 500 to 600 MHz chip clock and 600 to 800 MHz storing act
• Improvements with anti- Aliasing: (at least) a new mode; its SAM polarizing sample is however unknown
• Improvements with the anisotropic filter: unknown
• Presentation: GDC or CeBIT at the end of March 2004
• Market entrance: At the end of April or May
• 2004 Sales name: GeForceFX 6XXX

Discussion in this thread please!

In order to make the most sense of the current state of the graphics industry, we've decided to split our analysis into two distinct parts. In Part 1, we will look at the specifications and reference designs from both ATI and NVIDIA in order to determine which chipset is the best in the mid-range and high-end sector. In Part Two, we will examine the implementation of these chipsets and designs by various retail board partners and present which represent the best bang for your buck

Galaxy's Zeus 5700 Ultra

SANTA CLARA, CA-JANUARY 26, 2003-NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions, today announced the signing of an endorsement agreement with Team Schroet Kommando (SK), the world's top-ranked team in the competitive and growing sport of video gaming. Widely considered to be the best "Counter-Strike" team in the world, the six-man, multi-national Team SK is the reigning champions of the Cyberathlete Professional League(r) and World Cyber Games. As a result of the agreement, Team SK will train and compete on PCs equipped with NVIDIA GeForce(tm) FX graphics processing units (GPUs), as well as play a role in the Company's grassroots marketing campaigns geared towards gaming enthusiasts worldwide.

"We're pleased to be working with such an international force in competitive gaming," said Bill Rehbock, director of content development at NVIDIA. "Team SK's global fan base is unmatched and we're excited to have them drive home NVIDIA's position as the choice of gamers worldwide."

Andreas Thorstensson, leader and managing director of SK added, "This sponsorship relationship with NVIDIA is a major step for SK, as we found the perfect partner for giving us the equipment and support we need to keep us at the top of our game. NVIDIA's dedication and support for the gaming community is unmatched and we're pleased to be associated with such a winning company and brand."

The SK "Counter-Strike" roster includes: Emil "HeatoN" Christensen, Christer "fisker" Eriksson, Tommy "Potti" Ingemarsson, Abdisamad "SpawN" Mohamed, Ola "ElemenT" Moum, and Michael "ahl" Korduner. Team SK members range in age from 17-23 and hail from Sweden.

In 2004, Team SK plans to compete at all major competitive gaming events around the globe including this Summer's Electronic Sports World Cup in Poitiers, France; the Cyberathlete Professional League Summer Championships in Dallas, Texas; and the World Cyber Games in San Francisco, Calif., where they will vie for cash prizes collectively worth more than $800,0000. For more information about Team SK, please log onto www.schroet.com.

With Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 scheduled to debut in 2004, gaming on the PC will experience a rejuvination, which we've already seen with the Far Cry demo. 2004 will also be an especially important year for ATI and NVIDIA. Here is IGN's list of games that are covered for the PC.

• Battlefield Vietnam
• Black and White 2
• Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
• City of Heroes
• Colin McRae Rally 4
• DOOM 3
• DRIV3R
• Dungeon Siege 2
• EverQuest 2
• Far Cry
• Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich
• Half-Life 2
• Hitman: Contracts
• Joint Operations
• Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude
• Lords of the Realm 3
• Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth
• The Matrix Online
• Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault
• Men of Valor: Vietnam
• Middle Earth Online
• The Movies
• Pirates!
• Rome: Total War
• Sam and Max: Freelance Police
• The Sims 2
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Oblivion Lost
• Star Wars Battlefront
• Thief: Deadly Shadows
• Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow
• Tribes: Vengeance
• Ultima X: Odyssey
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines
• World of Warcraft

This was the first piece of hardware I have received from a company that I have had to consider if it is even reviewable. There were times when I was very close to taking the card out of the system and just sending it back however based on the lack of information/reviews on the internet regarding the performance and issues the card has I persevered. Hardware reviewing is generally quite interesting and on a lot of occasions more than a little fun. The Volari took all of the enjoyment out of using the test system and I fear that by the time there are some decent drivers which make the card useable we will already be looking at NV40/ R420 and XGI will have missed the boat.

There will be four major gaming tournaments planned using Desert Combat, Unreal Tournament 2003, Call of Duty, and Counter-Strike, a Case Mod contest, and a benchmarking competition. Clans are more than welcome to attend and arrangements will be made for the clan members to sit together.

And lots of great prizes that include:

• A custom Intel Pentium4 Extreme Edition gaming rig
• (5) Pentium4 3.2/3.4GHz CPUs with (5) top of the line Intel motherboards
• (5) BFG Asylum FX5950 Ultra video cards
• (5) ATI Radeon 9800XT Video cards
• ABIT motherboards and video cards
• DFI LanParty II motherboards
• Chenbro X-Pider Cases
• Yet to be released Cremax products
• Corsair XMS Memory
• PowMax power supplies and products
• All kinds of SVC.com products

Today, we'd like to pick apart a rather special topic: multisampling anti-aliasing. This topic is by no means just theory, it's implemented in actual, purchasable hardware. First we examine the multisampling procedures used by GeForce3, 4 Ti and FX, later we'll look at the multisampling of the Radeon line (Radeon 9500 or higher).

On virtually all modern cards anti-aliasing is performed via multisampling. Thus this method must have certain advantages and analysing these makes up a big part of this article. But nothing comes for free, and the disadvantages which might not be initially obvious, are disussed as well.

I am still trying to get a feel for optimal gameplay settings for my system where I can balance image quality and performance. Preliminary tests are showing that 1024x768 with 2X AA/4X AF with the in-game graphics auto-detect setting is favorable on a GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. EAX sound effects were enabled along with medium quality music.

FarCry Demo

Below are links to screenshots, around 600-700KB each, from the scene above that show the different graphics settings available in the demo. Although a message is issued that a restart is required for the settings to take effect, the screenshots did reveal visible changes without a restart. The frame rate appears in the upper right corner of each screenshot.

• Low Quality - 64 fps
• Medium Quality - 49 fps
• High Quality - 42 fps
• Very High Quality - 39 fps
• Auto Detect - 43 fps

If you have some free time this weekend, you'll certainly want to give the FarCry demo a try.

The NVIDIA® GeForce FX™ 5900 Ultra, 256MB is a GPU that will unleash stunning 3D worlds and the most life-like character animations ever seen in interactive entertainment. With a monstrous 256MB of video memory and the latest NVIDIA Technology, such as the UltraShadow, CineFX Engine, Intellisample Technology and High-Precision Graphics, the e-GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, 256MB will deliver lightning-fast, ultra-realistic visuals with no jagged edges at almost any resolution. Our e-GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, 256MB includes VIVO capabilities for enthusiasts, who want do video capturing and editing.

Regarding the MSI FX5950 Ultra VTD256 board. An excellent product with a remarkable package bundle (traditional for MSI). MSI FX5950 Ultra VTD256 appears to be a complete replica of the reference design, and implementation of such complex PCB like that in NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra is the most optimum solution. Despite the operation of the NV38 chip at the extreme speed, the MSI FX 5950 Ultra VTD256 board shows quite good overclocking results.

I'll present you an overview of the new cards with the help of a nice photo shoot, overview of the ForceWare drivers and then of course we'll dig into our benchmark suite where we have tested the card in both RAW and quality setting 8x Anisotropic filtering + Anti aliasing at 4 levels. That's not it though, in the article we are going to compare the new cards with almost all other GeForce FX cards and we'll throw in a couple of popular Radeon 9x00 cards as well. So this will be a very competitive review ...

XFX GeForce FX 5700 Ultra w/Dual DVI

XFX Family:

If you want to go beyond just gaming by connecting two displays but can’t afford the cost or space of two graphics cards, then XFX has developed the solution for you.

The all new XFX GeForce 5700 Ultra is one of the first dual DVI extreme gaming graphics card available on the market today.

Not only do you get the best gaming graphics on the planet powered by the NVIDIA FX generation of GPUs, but you also get one of the only dual DVI cards available anywhere.

So what does this mean? You get not only one but two DVI ports so you’ll save money and be ready for your next upgrade. And it’s been designed with versatility in mind. You can either use two LCD screens or two CRT monitors, or you can mix it up any way you like.

Be one of the first to take advantage of this new technology. And it’s available from XFX, leaders of the gaming revolution. Stop by our Web site, www.XFXforce.com, to see all that XFX has to offer.

-The XFX Team

"NVIDIA technology allows NASA to visualize the Martian terrain in photorealistic virtual reality, greatly enhancing scientists' understanding of the environment and streamlining analysis," said Laurence Edwards, Mars team lead for 3D visualization and surface reconstruction from NASA Ames Research Center. "With this capability, scientists step into a visually engaging model of the planet's surface and interactively study multiple perspectives -- front, back, side views -- of every object the rovers investigate to fully explore all options for rover routes and experiments."

Zalman has recognized the need for such an evolution. However, the creation of a passive cooling environment able to handle the extremely complex thermal envelope of the modern PC is no small feat. The surface area of even the largest passive heatsinks will simply not suffice without using a fan to move the heat away from the heatsink. Zalman's revolutionary new approach involves a combination of heat pipes. These heat pipes move the heat to the outside of the chassis, which is nothing more than one large heatsink surface.

The entire TNN 500A chassis, in fact, is a giant heatsink. Both the right and left side panels of the TNN 500A chassis feature natural convection cooled heatsinks; with the huge 400mm width of these side panels, both side panels of the case serve to radiate the heat to the outside of the chassis.

This project uses idle CPU cycle time to help the Folding@Home project to find out how proteins in our body fold and they fold in many ways. Doing so they can find out how they work or in some cases, how they don't fold properly and cause very debilitating diseases such as CJD, ALS, Parkinsons disease and eventual find a way to cure such diseases.

A member of our forums Poursoul has taken time to introduce you to the Folding@Home project and also guide you in installing a small client to get folding. Please help us (help all of us in the end) by clicking the headline to see our Folding@Home page and we hope you join us "Folding@Home". Remember that nV News team id number is "13531". We need your idle CPU cycles!!!

The Albatron 5700 Ultra is a very nice card. It's a full DirectX 9 card that is very affordable. This card is retailing for around the $180 range. This will put the card head to head with ATI's 9600XT line of cards. As you can see from the results of the benches the card will give you more than playable frame rates in every game that you could want to play right now.

The Albatron Gigi Geforce FX5900PV sports 128MB of Hynix HY5DU283222AF-22, 2.2ns DDR memory. The FX5900PV is based on FX5900 Core and has a clock speed of 400Mhz.

TrustedReviews also reviews a GeForce FX 5700 Ultra based card, the MSi GeForceFX 5700TD Ultra card. This card is manufactured on a red PCB and sports MSI's own HSF.

When the GeForceFX series was first introduced it suffered from extremely noisy and cumbersome cooling solutions. However this MSi card demonstrates how the GeForceFX line has matured. The heatsink has a sizable fan that’s as quiet as I’ve ever heard from an out-of-the-box solution, with the packaging stating that it will run no louder than 28db. Unlike the top of the line GeForceFX 5950, the card also occupies a single slot and fits comfortably in a Shuttle based PC.

THEALE, BERKSHIRE — JANUARY 13, 2004 — NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions, today announced that its multimedia graphics technology is primed to impact the mobile phone and PDA market, as Mitsubishi Electric has incorporated the NVIDIA® GoForce™ 2100 technology into its latest i-mode™ mobile phone, the M341i.

The NVIDIA GoForce 2100 handheld multimedia processor is ultra low-power, and is designed to implement video and camera functionality on the handset LCD display. The GoForce 2100 offers VGA camera compatibility, supporting QVGA resolutions ideally suited to mobile phone displays, and it provides an onboard JPEG encoder, which handles captured images and compresses still pictures in resolutions up to VGA resolution (640 × 480). By delivering incredibly low-power hardware acceleration, the GoForce 2100 can provide mobile phone and PDA consumers with rich multimedia content and extended battery life.

EPoX VGA graphic cards bring a new level of graphic performance to desktop PCs delivering new generation 3D experience. From GeForce MX440/MX4000 to FX5200 and even the highest performance FX5950 Ultra, EPoX provides a full range to satisfy your performance needs! EPoX VGA cards are based upon the chipsets from Nvidia to continue our successful relationship.

The NVIDIA nVHardPage tweaker has been updated towards nVHardPage v1.86.0b multilanguage and serves on en/disabling hidden features in nVidia control panel, tweaking nVidia Direct3D and OpenGL settings and overclocking your nVidia graphic card.

Whats new in v1.86.0b

• added refresh function in Multitexturing and Shaders settings tab
• added option for en/disabling Troubleshooting page
• added Direct3D image quality settings
• added TV applet control
• added Performance monitor option
• updated Direct3D Antialiasing modes for ForceWare drivers
• updated detonator driver databases
• updated W-buffer settings
• updated Skin editor
• fixed settings for Thermal page
• fixed digital vibrance level status with ForceWare drivers
• fixed image sharpening status with ForceWare drivers
• some others small fixes and changes

CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW—LAS VEGAS, NV—JANUARY 9, 2004—NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions, today announced it is demonstrating its PCI Express architecture at the Consumer Electronics Show. PCI Express is the next revolution in I/O interconnect standard that NVIDIA will deploy in future graphics solutions as the next step in delivering the bandwidth and features required for high-resolution graphics, games, and other graphically-intensive applications.

PCI Express significantly increases bandwidth between the central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) by enabling a balanced distribution of bandwidth to those applications that require it the most. NVIDIA‘s PCI Express bridge chip, an industry first, affords the flexibility to instantly adapt a variety of the Company’s award-winning GPUs to the new PCI Express bus technology with the full capabilities and throughput offered by PCI Express.

Our ATi & nVidia graphic cards tweak tool aTuner has reached a new version. aTuner 1.7.43 supports ATi drivers from version 3.0 up to 3.10 and nVidia drivers from version 23.11 up to 53.04. The new version have the following updates:

• Bugfixes for Radeons
• Annoying bug in hardware detection fixed
• D3D profile setting for Radeons fixed
• Small changes for Detonator 53.xx

For CES, NVIDIA and The Creature Shop will introduce "Dawn". Introduced in conjunction with the NVIDIA GeForce(TM) FX graphics processing unit (GPU), "Dawn", the world's most detailed realtime, 3D human character, was developed to showcase what is possible with cinematic computing. With the Henson Digital Performance Studio(TM), "Dawn" will be controlled using puppetry to interact with show attendees.

"For more than 20 years, The Creature Shop has produced amazing characters for film, TV, and advertising," said Dan Vivoli, executive vice president of marketing at NVIDIA. "By using the unique skills of Jim Henson's Creature Shop(TM) we were able to add a new dimension to our demos, allowing us the ability to "perform" expressions of computer generated characters in real- time. By having the ability to control characters down to eyelid blinks and facial animations, we're able to bring a whole new meaning to 'cinematic computing'."

The GeForce FX 5950 Ultra core the ASUS V9980 Ultra is based on is designed for performance. It boasts a 475MHz core clock, with 256MB of high-speed DDR memory, also operating at 475MHz (950MHz effective). NVIDIA and its board partners actually use 2.0ns memory modules on their 5950 Ultra boards, so there’s actually a little bit of room built-in for overclocking.

Last, Gamer's Depot has a review of a Leadtek Winfast A360 Ultra TDH GeForce FX 5700 Ultra graphics card. This card is compared with a Radeon 9600XT. What is strange is that the Winfast A360 Ultra TDH Gamer's Depot reviews uses TSOP memory modules going by their pictures of the card? I was under the assumption that all GeForce FX 5700 Ultras utilized BGA DDR II memory modules. They liked the card in any case.

Leadtek has done an admirable job of bundling its 5700 Ultra and is quite frankly a very nice card for the average gamer who doesn’t consider themselves a power-user or hard-core gamer. Its DX9 performance bodes well in most of the games we’ve tested in this benchmark (who plays Tomb Raider anyway?) and rocks right along in the DX8 games of Gunmetal and Unreal Tournament 2003.

What a nice card to own people! We see a decent enough potential in overclocking on this card that brings it close towards GeForce FX 5900 Ultra in some cases. In fact it closes in on the default clocked 5950 Ultra so that makes up for a lot, I guess. The product is equipped with memory that can handle a tad more than it's default specification, that's additional value. So it's like this, if you do not want or simply can't spend a huge amount of money on a high-end graphics cards and can settle for a little less, then we definitely recommend the product, it's very stable and for the money it offers heaps of functionality, features and really nice performance. You can basically play any game to date without any issue at all.

CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW—LAS VEGAS, NV—JANUARY 7, 2004—NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions, will demonstrate a “New World of Cinematic Computing” at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas from January 8-11. Featuring a diverse line-up of graphics and multimedia technologies, NVIDIA provides the ultimate foundation for powering a new generation of digital devices.

“As consumer interest in digital devices and media such as digital cameras, camcorders, high-definition TV, PC games, DVDs and MP3 music players skyrockets, today’s PCs are increasingly becoming the centerpiece of the digital home,” said Dan Vivoli, executive vice president of marketing at NVIDIA “NVIDIA’s graphics and multimedia technologies are at the forefront of unleashing the PC’s potential as a powerful all-in one entertainment device for the digital decade, or as we like to call it, the new era of cinematic computing.”

At CES, NVIDIA will showcase:

Cinematic Computing: NVIDIA’s award-winning family of GeForce™ FX graphics processing units (GPUs) for desktop and notebook PCs unleashes next-generation 3D graphics, special effects and set-top quality video playback found at the heart of today’s most popular multimedia software applications, such as PC games, digital photography, home video editing, DVD playback and more.
• Live, Interactive 3D Character Demo with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop: NVIDIA and the Creature Shop will debut “Dawn,” one of the world’s most detailed, 3D-generated characters. Brought to life through a mix of the latest 3D graphics technologies and traditional puppetry techniques, “Dawn” will be interacting with show attendees daily.
• 3D Graphics Solutions for Mobile, Wireless Devices: NVIDIA’s GoForce™ media processors are energy-optimized chips which accelerate graphics and video content within extremely limited power budgets, providing handset designers with the ability to deliver high-resolution, picture capture, video capture, video playback, gaming and multimedia messaging applications on cellular handsets and handheld devices.
• Media Center-based PCs and software: Already the technology of choice for the majority of Media Center-based PCs, NVIDIA is extending its product offering to include the new ForceWare™ Multimedia software application, a simple-to-use program designed to bring television viewing, DVD playback and VCR-like storage capabilities to networked PC users.
• Innovative New PC Designs: The design and flexibility of NVIDIA-based graphics and media communications processing solutions is enabling a new breed of high-end multimedia PCs designed to replace the traditional beige-box with a sleek, consumer electronic-like device that complements any room in the home. From Media Center PCs to portable gaming PCs, some of the most innovative new PC designs will be on display at the NVIDIA booth.

In addition, NVIDIA and its partners will showcase some of the hottest new PC games of 2004, including Unreal Tournament 2004 from Epic Games and Battlefield Vietnam from EA Games. The NVIDIA booth is located in the South Hall (#20293) of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Albatron has done an excellent job with their 5950 Ultra card. The Wise Fan technology is exceptional. It is very functional while keeping noise levels to a minimum.

SANTA CLARA, CA—JANUARY 6, 2004—NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions, today announced that its NVIDIA nForce™3 media and communications processors (MCPs)—which have been lauded by major industry publications and technology Web sites for their stability and performance—fully support the new AMD Athlon64 Processor 3400+ announced earlier today.

“Our close working relationship with AMD has allowed us to design NVIDIA nForce3 as a scalable architecture that can take full advantage of AMD’s current and upcoming product roadmap,” said Drew Henry, general manager of platform products at NVIDIA. “The new Athlon64 Processor 3400+ extends AMD’s performance lead in the desktop PC market, and is a perfect match to our entire line of NVIDIA nForce3 MCPs, including our upcoming NVIDIA nForce3 250GB MCPs, which features the industry’s first native Gigabit Ethernet solution.”

SANTA CLARA, CA—JANUARY 6, 2004—NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions, today announced it has been named one of the “100 Best Companies to Work For” by FORTUNE magazine in a study conducted in conjunction with the Great Place to Work Institute of San Francisco.

If you're going to buy a top of the line videocard it'll either have an ATi or nVIDIA logo on the core that's for certain. And as you have seen, nVIDIA's GeForceFX 5950 Ultra was able to match ATi's latest and greatest 9800XT in many of the benchmarks we threw at the videocards.

More importantly as we have seen, nVidia's new mainstream GeForceFX 5700 Ultra GPU is able to match the Radeon 9600XT! From the benchmarks we've shown, it's clear that the GeForceFX 5700 Ultra is the real deal and was able to best the Radeon 9600XT in many of the tests.

"...one of our main goals is to focus on invigorating Windows as a multimedia and gaming platform, and innovation across all aspects of multimedia, especially graphics and HLSL."

Jan began this project as an alternative to hardware displacement mapping and adaptive tessellation, which has yet to be exposed in current graphics hardware. These techniques are especially useful when rendering vast landscapes at a high level of detail.

Now a year after the release of DX9 we all know that the promised hardware displacement mapping has not been implemented in the first generation of DX9 processors. The current GPUs only implement vertex shader 2.0. For displacement mapping vertex shader 3.0 is required. Also a hardware tessellator is needed. Hopefully with the next generation of graphics processors, to be released in the first half of 2004, the promised hardware adaptive displacement mapping will come true.

Beta drivers, disabled functions, and lower clock speeds. Keeping in mind these factors we have to judge carefully about the Volari-family, but somehow we've felt one thing during the whole test. We've felt that below the immature surface of the drivers, something beneath carried a true value. “Surprisingly” the card performed best under 3DMark 03 which we felt was only eye-catching and disturbed us most.

We tested two top products from EVGA and PowerColor based on two eternal rivals: NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and ATI RADEON 9800 XT. New hints for extreme overclocking lovers, new gaming benchmarks including Lock On: Modern Air Combat, new performance heights. Read on to find out more exciting things!

Soltek Qbic Mini Barebone System

I finished up by installing and testing the performance of a variety of add-in graphics cards that include the XFX GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, BFG GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, and Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro.

Click the headline or image to check it out.

"For our first review of 2004 we take a look at Gigabyte's very newest video card, the N595U based on nVidia's GeForce FX 5950 Ultra GPU. It has been quite some time since we've seen an nVidia based video card from Gigabyte ever since ATI turned up the heat around about 12 months ago. Gigabyte once again has embraced nVidia; let's see what they have come up with!"

Gamepyre also keeps the MSI theme going. They review MSI's maintream GeForce FX 5700 Ultra card.