Introduction

GeForce FX 5900 XT: NVIDIA’s Ti 4200 killer?

When it was released, NVIDIA’s GeForce4 Ti 4200 was highly regarded throughout the graphics world thanks to its unique combination of performance, features, and price. Since it was based on the exact same graphics core as NVIDIA’s flagship GeForce4 Ti 4600, the Ti 4200 offered all the capabilities of NVIDIA’s best product, and with its 250MHz core, the Ti 4200 offered most of its performance as well. What consumers really appreciated though was the Ti 4200’s price – cards could easily be found for less than half the price of a Ti 4600!

MSI 5900XT (top), Leadtek (middle) and eVGA at the bottom

Gigabyte's 5900XT (bottom) and Chaintech 5900XT up top surround the eVGA card

As a result, GeForce4 Ti 4200’s were flying off the shelves from NVIDIA’s board partners, many of whom went through four or more generations of Ti 4200-based products. Even today, both ATI and NVIDIA are still trying to escape the shadow of the Ti 4200, nearly two years after it was first introduced.

Mainstream cards like the RADEON 9500/9600 PRO and GeForce FX 5600/5700 Ultra are inevitably compared to the Ti 4200, and while they’ve demonstrated more overall performance when visual quality settings are maxed out, many gamers found the low prices these cards sell for to be too tempting to pass up, while many more Ti 4200 owners have been content holding on to their cards: just as the GeForce2 MX had introduced millions of gamers to the world of T&L and DX7 graphics, the GeForce4 Ti 4200 was the launch pad for many into DX8. And the bottom line was that NVIDIA and ATI had some big shoes to fill and were having somewhat of a hard time doing it. Their mainstream offerings just weren’t capturing the hearts and minds of consumers like the Ti 4200.

The RADEON 9500 PRO offered good performance, especially when anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were in use, but many felt it didn’t offer enough performance over the GeForce4 Ti 4200 to justify the purchase. ATI’s follow-up, the RADEON 9600 PRO was criticized for not outperforming its predecessor, while NVIDIA’s mainstream offering, GeForce FX 5600 Ultra was impossible to find for months.

Then, in late 2003 NVIDIA quietly launched its GeForce FX 5900 XT. The 5900 XT had been previously known as the 5900 Value. It had been announced (along with the rest of the 5900 line last spring) as a cost reduced version of the 5900 Ultra, but other than that NVIDIA remained mum on the details. When its initial launch date passed, many forgot about the project, while others assumed that if it would ever ship, it would come with fewer features, some had even suggested NVIDIA would slice its memory interface in half, to 128-bits, much like ATI had done with RADEON 9500 PRO.

Fortunately, none of this ultimately came true, in fact, the 5900 XT shares the Ti 4200’s main trait in that it supports NVIDIA’s flagship feature for feature; with the only difference being reduced performance. As a result, 5900 XTs have been quickly adopted. These cards can easily be found for under $200! Therefore we’ve decided to roundup a few of the best of these cards to see what they have to offer.