NVIDIA's Back with NV35 - GeForceFX 5900 Ultra

At 1024x768 the 5900 Ultra does extremely well, already breaking the 100 fps mark. What's interesting to note is how close the NV30 and NV35 are in this benchmark, indicating that raw GPU power not memory bandwidth is actually a limiting factor here.

Without any AA/Anisotropic filtering enabled, ATI's solutions fall siginficantly behind the NV30/35.

It's also worth noting that the new GeForceFX 5600 Ultra improves performance by 12% over the previous card we reviewed.

What's quite impressive is that even the mainstream cards are quite playable at 1024x768; with more driver tuning and turning down a few more image quality features (even at medium quality we're dealing with an extremely good looking setup) would make Doom3 even more playable on the cheaper cards.

As we crank up the resolution we see that the performance drop is significant, even the almighty NV35 falls a good 33%. The standings remain virtually unchanged, but it's clear that the mainstream cards will be limited to resolutions of 1024x768 and below, which isn't different from what we'd expect.

Given the slower paced nature of the game, even 1600x1200 may be considered playable for many gamers if you look at the performance of the 5900/5800 Ultra. Once again we see that the performance difference between the NV35 and NV30 isn't all that great, but let's see what happens when we crank up the AA/Aniso modes.