What the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra SHOULD have been

In this video we compare the notorious GeForce FX 5800 Ultra to its spiritual successor of sorts, the GeForce 6600GT.

Previous videos covering the FX series:

Platform specs:
Phenom II X4 965BE @ 4.12GHz
2GB OCZ Platinum Ed. PC2-8500 @ 1000MHz
ASRock AM2NF3-VSTA (NVIDIA nForce 3)
Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS
Samsung 830 Series 128GB SSD
Windows XP Professional SP3
Drivers:
-GeForce FX 5800 Ultra: Forceware 71.89
-GeForce 6600GT: Forceware 163.71

Platform Specs used in tests taken from Card Battles video:
Pentium E5800 @ 3.75GHz
2GB OCZ Platinum Ed. PC3200 @ 400MHz
ASRock 775i65G (Intel 865G)
Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS
Samsung 830 Series 128GB SSD
Windows XP Professional SP3
Drivers:
-GeForce FX 5800 Ultra: Forceware 71.89
-Radeon 9700 Pro: Catalyst 10.2 (Legacy)

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[infasis]

The FX 5700 was my last GPU before switching to primarily gaming on consoles for awhile and I dreamed of that 6800 Ultra. (Probably, the mermaid that Nvidia is so ashamed of now too, but that's another story). The 6800 seemed so large and expensive to me at the time though. If I only knew what fate had in store...

[tigerdefensesystems]

What many fail to realize is to "WHY" the Nvidia FX series was slower in DX9 titles.. one of the main issues was the higher precision 32bit done on shader processing, hence making it slower, but once the 5900Ultra and 5950 came out wasn't so bad... it was all just the start of DX9 games anyways.. kind of reminds me the first gen RTX 2000 series cards and DLSS and Raytracing performance compared to the 3000 series of today. It will take another gen for great raytracing performance... if gamers can actually get their hands on these cards.

[ctrlaltrees]

You know far more about graphics cards than I do so I'll leave that aspect to you - but I just wanted to say that that shirt is excellent.

[brettlivingston]

Really appreciate your content. Your passion and understanding of graphical tech is unsurpassed IMHO.

[Baulder]

dang UT3 at 1024x7689 pushing 150+ fps lol. Thats some serious screen ratio and pixel throughput haha.. I know its a typo. Thanks for the vid Nathan!

[PPC]

Just built a new retro rig with an Asrock ALiveDual-esata2, one of the newest and best native AGP boards. It's been years trying to get hold of one of these mobos as its been a sort of holy grail piece of tech for me. Great video as usual Nathan!

[Ieatcrumbs]

fun fact, if 3DFX was still around i would not exist. My parents would have never settled down or shared the experience of declining Nvidia's teams.

[homelessEh]

one of my homies had a bfg 6600gtoc i remember him using it for quite some time through the quake3 era and its fan melting off while making it play left 4 dead. a replacement cooler was sourced and it kept on for a year and gave way to a ati x1650. it found another owner and played alot of fallout 3 and combat arms. it suffered artifacting and had been oven fixed no less then 4 times before it was too far gone. it lived a full life.

[HappyBeezerStudios]

The "updated" FX lineup already improved DX9 performance.
The FX 5700 and 5900 cards were pretty decent.
It was a brute force solution, they just added a 3rd vertex shader to the pipeline, but that still meant 50% higher shading performance.

The worst of them is probably the infamous FX 5200. The FX 5200 Ultra on the other hand was a decent card. Really good DX8 performance.
In general the FX cards are great for DX8


And comparing the 6600 GT I have to add my old 7300 GT into the mix. It was one of those models that use a cut-down midrange chip on a low-end card and performed very close to the 6600 GT. The other 7300 cards used the low end chip.
On mine I could get a 60% chip overclock which brought it close to a 7600 GS. In a modern day comparison, that would be like taking a GT 1030 and clocking it to performance parity with a GTX 1060 or clocking a RTX 3050 to catch up with a 3060 Ti or even a 3070

[furynotes]

I like that you added the 9 after 768 part of the resolution benchmarks.

[SUCRA]

Thanks for another great video, Nathan! I love the 5800, it's so bad and so interesting. I have a 5850 ultra that I need to explore but have been putting off. Thanks for all your contribution to the retro community.

[PixelPipes]

Thanks to everyone who's enjoyed this video!
As stated later in the video, I am officially parting ways with my holy grail, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra! I have had a lot of fun getting to use this card, and getting to record benchmarks, gameplay footage, and film it, and be able to share it with you all.
Apologies to my international viewers, but given the state of global shipping right now, I can only ship it within the US.

[popilopioops]

Great video & great channel ! Thanks Nathan, have a great day !

[xKynOx]

These videos make me feel so old i remember when they were new I still have a 6600GT left over from my Athlon(x86) 3000 rig.

[glennm]

"The Dawn of Cinematic Computing" ahhh I remember 2003 like yesterday.

[heatsync]

Was waiting for leaf blower sound as intro :)

[bojinglebells]

I dont think the theoretical GPU would have been clocked anywhere near 500MHz; not only was the 6600 GT on a 110nm node, a big part of the 5800 Ultra's troubled development was from nVidia trying to push it on a then-unproven 130nm node, of which even if nVidia had stuck with pushing a product on the 130nm node instead of the mature 150nm node the 9700/9800 were on, I don't think they would have been as desperate to hit such high clock speeds and would have also been able to implement a reasonable cooling solution.

[troglodude]

My big "what if" is if the xbox had better specs namely if it had the dream specs i.e 128 mb of ram instead of 64, and a 1.5ghz cpu instead of 733, and if it had xbox live from release. I think about this ALOT

[BoahsLoL]

subscribed, you're very well spoken and get straight to the point. love the vids

[danielsuguwa]

Well Nathan, I've update for you in response of the beginning of this video. As of September 2nd 2022, Intel's back at making proper PC GPU (not without any problem though) and Imagination Technologies has stated in their recent 30 years anniversary video that they'll back with another PowerVR PC GPU (despite their first official reentry would be Fantasy One GPU back in 2020, released in China), starting with mobile first. I can't wait to see how GPU war will materialize in 21st century, with AMD, Intel, Nvidia and Imagination Technologies fight for GPU (and small extends of APU) supremacy. That makes me excited for any long-term PC gaming! Thanks for the video, Nathan! 😁