The GeForce FX Series - NVIDIA's Huge Misstep

The notorious GeForce FX series lives up to its reputation. But why? In this documentary-style video we take a look back at what made the FX series one of NVIDIA's worst generations of cards.

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Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

[phazonclash]

I remember that card, the rich kid at school had the GeForce 5800 Ultra and kept bragging about it and how great and expensive it was... lol That same year, I got some money for Christmas, and with the money I already had, I purchased a 9800 Pro. When Half-Life 2 came out about 1 year later, the 9800 Pro was literally destroying the FX 5800 Ultra and I had my own personal revenge: That rich kid admitted it was running better on my computer than his :P

[Qjimbo]

"Just 4 pixel pipes"
*crowd cheers* he said it! he said the name of the show!

[triadwarfare]

The FX name is just as damaging to the brand for Geforce as AMD's processors almost a decade later.

[AKU-hsrj]

Fun fact: Microsoft was fed up with Nvidia because they never gave them discounts for the GF3 chips for the Xbox so they invited ATI to work with them on DX9 instead while giving Nvidia the specs for DX9 very late (maybe even the wrong ones via 16 bit). So basically the fail of FX is caused by Nvidias greediness regarding the Xbox GPU

[IVANxVx]

Great video! I still remember being rewarded for my good grades in 8th grade with a visit to the computer store with my dad to buy me a graphics card. It was a... Geforce FX 5200 :/
And this was in 2006.

[saturnotaku]

I had one of the Radeon 9500 cards that could be soft-modded to a 9700 Pro. One of the best GPUs I ever owned.

[Ivan-prku]

Nvidia did everything wrong with NV30 that could have been done:

1. New architecture on a new manufacturing process, usually resulting in sub-optimal TDP.
2. Narrow pipeline at high clock speeds, with strict vector format packing.
3. Over-engineered features, well outside of the contemporary API scope, at expense of the raw throughput.

In other words, that generation was the "Pentium 4" of the GPUs.
NV35 (FX5900 Series) fared rather well, to be honest -- lots of sales and the saving grace, until NV40 was ready.

By the way, the record short R&D time for NV40 was due to the fact that most of the work was already done with the NV3x series and the only effort left was to beef up the performance per clock and smooth the SM3.0 validation.
By that time (2004), the work on the future G80 and CUDA compute frame-work was gearing up for a big surprise.

[AlexRoivas]

I remember back then being perplex as to why Nvidia didnt put in a 256bit memory bus on the Geforce FX 5800 and 5800 Ultra when it came out in early 2003. The ATI Radeon 9700 Pro came out in late 2002 and had 256bit memory bus greatly helping it with memory bandwith .

[jhonrock]

lol! Now I understand why, back in the day, people used to say that ATI 9000 series had better image quality than nVidia FX series.

[ronindebeatrice]

Yeah, yeah, sure, but that nude Dawn demo surely made up for it. I was a young man, dammit!

[james]

I love the 90's documentary style.

[kruton]

NVIDIA FX serie from 5700 and up wasn't too bad. But agree, 5200-5500 cards were very-very slow.
These video cards are great for retro gaming: good compatibility and performance in DOS games, good performance in old Windows games with high quality settings, very compatible 4X.XX-5X.XX Windows 9X drivers aviable, it is the last generation of video cards with "8-bit paletted textures" feature supported, also "table fog" feature is natively supported. And also these cards are the best in Voodoo Glide API wrapping, maybe because they were developed by ex-3DFX developers.

[Jerred_with_Es_and_Rs]

My first PC gaming experience came from a Dell Inspiron 4600 that came with a 5200. I was pretty young at the time and only really knew that it had a graphics card and that meant I could play games! I suffered my way through Half Life 2 and Doom 3 with hardly playable performance. When I finally upgraded to a BFG 6800 OC I played Half Life 2 again and it was like a brand new game!

[abcdefg]

As weak as it is the GeForce fx series is the oldest GPU series capable of running on windows 10 with wddm drivers.

[silentseawolf]

If I recall correctly, there was a texture you could delete and the Nvidia fairy had no cloths...

[triadwarfare]

6:52 Lowspecgamer was impressed on how the FX5200 ran on Far Cry despite being poor on everything else. He thinks it was due to optimization. Now we know the reason why

[kami]

I think this video is a huge step up in quality, really well realised ! I'm really impressed, you've worked hard on it, it's obvious. Everybody in the comment section should respect that ! Keep up the great work dude ;)

Greetings from France

[cybercapri]

You had mad communication skills as a commentator, well done... Too many folks rush their pitch and step over facts that you cover with clarity... Keep up the great work...

[tHeWasTeDYouTh]

was it really called GeForce FX because people from 3dfx made it??? why didn't they just call it GeForce 5?
RIP 3dfx, will never forget the first time I played Quake on a Voodoo, seeing the difference between software mode and a graphics accelerator was the most amazing experience ever. Gaming changed for me after that revelation.

[aegisofhonor]

I knew at least two people who had FX cards back in the day. They were terrible, tons of errors, and one burned out completely after just 1 year (just after warranty expired no less). As far as I know, they both switched to ATI/AMD for at least the next decade, not sure what they use now.