nV News - BFG Technologies Asylum GeForce FX 5900 Ultra Review

This game is another one that is supposedly heavily CPU dependent. I can believe it. It'll still bring even the latest/greatest machine to it's knees if you kick up all settings and AA/AF to highest settings. The best impression I can convey is that the game is immensely smoother and just has a much better feel to it than it did on my Ti4800SE. I like to play at 1024x768 with all of the eye-candy on and 4X AA / 8X AF.

Above are are my results based on Mike's first game play benchmark. To more easily compare our two result sets check out the graph below. My results are overlaying Mike's results which are shown in grayscale. Note that the numeric values represent Mike's results.

(See paragraph above this graph)

The overlay thing was kind of a test so let me know if you like it. For the above graph you can compare to Mike's results via this link. Also, it's worth noting that AA does not work with the 44.03 Detonator drivers in Morrowind. This has been corrected the 44.61 version though.

This is an additional test that I decided to toss in. I've been curious as to what kind of performance difference there is between shadows at 50% and 100%.

As you can see above the answer is; not much. When compared to the previous graph at 1600x1200 you'll notice that there's basically no difference at all whether shadows are on or not.

Could this be evidence of the new NVIDIA UltraShadow Technology advantages? I don't know if Morrowind was written to take advantage of UltraShadow or not but the results are impressive regardless.

NOTE: One of our readers reproduced the same shadow results with an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro so UltraShadow isn't likely involved. I doubted that it was since MW was written quite a while before NV35 was finalized.

Bottom Line - Morrowind: I'd never really gotten too involved into this game despite how much I'd anticipated it and been a fan of the previous Elder Scrolls games. The reason for this is that I never was really happy with performance that my previous video cards offered. With the Asylum 5900 Ultra, let's just say that I'm now very happy.

The results really tend to jump around here so I'm not too sold on the accuracy of these results. I find benchmarking this kind of games kind of difficult with many intangibles and the flow of games like this is so different than the typical first person shooter.

Bottom Line - Neverwinter Nights: It looked great and played well. Admittedly, I really didn't do too much with this one, but what little I did experience was nice.

Due to time constraints I did not benchmark this game. Also, I'd prefer to benchmark Forgotten Battles (which I do not currently have) instead of this original version. I did play it quite a bit though and was impressed with the Asylum's performance in all but 8XAA @ 1600x1200 where it took a bit of a dive. I didn't see any improvement of 8X AA over 4X AA though so this wasn't a big deal to me.