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With the dawn of Nvidia's 6 series GPUs, mid-range performance has increased significantly. However not everyone can afford the (associated) price tag for a decent 6600GT or a vanilla 6800. We join Dave Howes on a journey into the world of budget gaming.
Due to the influx of these high performance GPUs, the last generation of high end Nvidia card the FX5900 series is dropping in price. This is especially so in the second hand market, leading to opportunities for the more cost conscious buyer. In our case, we were able purchase an XFX XF5900XT card on Ebay for approximately £90.
The XFX FX5900XT card is a reasonable card with the core clocked at 390MHz, and the memory clocked at 700 or 800MHz depending on the manufacturer. This gives good performance on all current games, as well as reasonable performance on the latest games such as Doom 3 and Half Life 2. It is, to all intents and purposes, a cut down version of the FX900 card. It sports 128Mb of DDR, and a lower core speed than the FX5900.
We decided to put the FX5900XT card through its paces, and see exactly what it can do when pushed. We overclocked the card, within reason, sticking with a 460MHz core clock, and 960MHz memory clock. The card would clock to 496/980MHz, but temperature became an issue, and the stock cooling provided was not practical. For benchmarking, we started with the much loved 3DMark03 benchmark with the latest patch, running the default test. First we ran 3DMark03 with the card at standard settings, and then with the overclocked settings.
This resulted in an 11.5% increase in performance, with a score of over 6000 points. This is pretty good for a 5900 series GPU, let alone a budget version!
However, benchmarks often fail to tell the whole story, so we settled on using BF1942 to test the 'real life' performance of the card. Using the DCFINAL mod, we ran two sets of tests; one at 1600x1200@85Hz and another at 1024x768@85Hz. Both sets of tests were run with 8XAA and 8xAF to see how the card runs with the visual enhancements turned up full. We used both the indoor and outdoor part of a level to obtain these results, as indoor tends to be heavier on the textures, and outdoor with large scale terrain rendering. This testing was repeated three times to obtain an average, using FRAPS (a free utility to test frame rate and more). The measurements showed an astounding increase of 42.4% at 1600x1200, and a good boost of 22% at 1024x768.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the card struggles at 1600x1200 with FSAA resolutions at stock speeds. However, overclock the card to a speeds similar to it's more expensive brethren (FX5900Ultra and FX5950), and it shows a performance that's very close!
Conclusion At stock speeds, the XFX FX5900XT is a reasonable performer, but nothing amazing. On the other hand, overclock the card, and you may well see performance comparable to the 5900Ultra cards. Maintaining an average of over 30FPS, even when at 1600x1200 with the highest settings available on BF1942 is impressive. The XFX 5900XT is up to the task, and for less than £100 second hand, it has to be a serious contender for the budget gamer. Discuss this in the forums!
Dave Howes
Test Rig: Abit KV8-pro, Athlon64 3000+@2250mhz, 512Mb PC3500, SB Audigy 2zs, XFX 5900XT, Seagate Barracuda 120gb
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