eVGA NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Personal Cinema Review - Page 2 of 7
By Chris Arthington - June 28, 2004 Edited By Ed Piotrowski
TEST SETUP
The system I used would be considered mid-range so it should factor in well with the FX 5700, which is intended for this market.
Athlon XP 2400+, operating at 2.1 GHz with a 175 MHz front side bus
512 MB of DDR memory, operating at 175 FSB (350 Mhz DDR)
Asus A7N8X Deluxe 2.0: NVIDIA nForce 2 400 Ultra chipset
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card
eVGA Geforce FX 5700 Personal Cinema
ATI Radeon 8500 All-In-Wonder DV (for comparison)
Window XP Professional with DirectX 9.0b
NVIDIA Forceware 56.72 drivers
ATI Catalyst 4.5 drivers
On The Motherboard
BENCHMARK SOFTWARE
Personal Cinema and All-In-Wonder cards fit into a niche market. These cards carry a higher price tag than their gaming and value counterparts. As a result, users are less likely to upgrade their existing cards as quickly as the typical enthusiast would. The purpose of this review is to show users what they can expect from upgrading their previous generation multimedia graphic card. In light of this we will be using an ATI Radeon 8500 All-In-Wonder DV for comparison. This DirectX 8.1-class card which has been extremely popular in the midrange multimedia market. Keep in mind that the results between these cards shouldn't be directly compared as they are from two different generations and differ greatly in feature sets and from a technology standpoint.
The following games will be used for this test:
Unreal Tournament 2003
Everquest: Gates of Discord
Neverwinter Nights
Call of Duty: Dawnville Demo
Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne
Need for Speed Underground
On the NVIDIA card, all tests were conducted with 8x Quality anisotropic filtering enabled. Full-scene anti-aliasing was tested on default, 2x and 4x settings. For the ATI All-In-Wonder, anisotropic filtering was set to 8x; 2x and 4x Quality anti-aliasing also were used.
These tests do not represent an apples to apples comparison. The Geforce FX 5700 card uses multi sampling for its anti-aliasing and employs trilinear optimisations for its anisotropic filtering. The Radeon uses super sampling for all its anit-aliasing and employs pure bilinear anistropic filtering.
Game On!
THE FORCEWARE TV APPLICATION
The TV tuner is quite possibly the most important function of a multimedia graphic card, and the software can play a defining role in your enjoyment of watching television on your PC. The NVIDIA TV Player fills this role well. All the important aspects of channel flipping, volume control and recording of live TV are accessible from within the easy to use user interface. You can flip channels one at a time or set channels individually from within the control panel. NVIDIA TV does boast a unique feature that proved to be very useful called Time shifting. Time shifting is a TIVO-like feature that allows you to pause, fast forward and rewind live television. This is a very useful feature if you have missed a part of your favorite television show due to various circumstances and would still like to view it without having to wait for it to air again.
Time shifting, however, is a very resource demanding feature. I recommend disabling it if you are doing a lot of multi tasking with your computer. And on an additional note, the Guide Plus software appears to have issues accurately displaying TV listings in my area. This is not a fault with the NVIDIA software but rather a discrepancy in the channel listings for my area through Guide TV.
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