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Benchmark System

Aquamark 3

Aquamark 3 has become one
of the popular alternatives to 3DMark. This benchmark uses the Krass Engine
which is used to power Massive Development's Aquanox 2 game. The benchmark
uses many DirectX 9 features and therefore is a good measurement of DX9 capabilities.

Looking at
the above chart, the FX5700 Ultra performs very well. It significantly beats
the older FX5600 Ultra and matches the Radeon 9700 in DirectX 9 performance.
As we have heard from NVIDIA in the past, the series 50 Detonator drivers
are designed for DirectX 9 specifically and increases FX-series performance
dramatically. So far the FX5700 Ultra looks like to be a worthy competitor,
unlike the FX5600 Ultra which never came close to being in the same class.

SpecPerf 7.1

SpecPerf uses industry
standard applications (like 3DS Max and Pro/Engineer) to create a benchmark
that measures real-world professional performance. This benchmark is purely
OpenGL based and gives a good sense of how graphics hardware performs in
rendering applications. For gamers, this benchmark would give you an idea
of raw performance, but is a poor reflection of actual game play.

Here we see some interesting
results. In some tests, the FX5700 Ultra actually matches the FX5900 Ultra.
This is very good news for you professionals out there who do a lot of CAD/CAM.
For half the price, you can get performance seen in the more expensive FX5900
Ultra. Comparing the FX5700 Ultra to the soft-modded Radeon 9500 (our "Radeon
9700" surrogate) we see that the NVIDIA card is better at some applications
and worse in others. The FX5700 Ultra appears to be a good alternative to
the Radeon 9700 depending on the application.

3DMark 03

3DMark 03 has been at the
center of some controversy in recent months. Despite this, it remains a good
method of comparing results between systems assuming you are comparing apples
to apples. 3DMark 03 uses a combination of DirectX 7, DirectX 8, and a small
sampling of DirectX 9.

The FX5700 Ultra has a
significant 600 point lead over the FX5600 Ultra thanks to higher core/mem
clocks and DDR-II. What I find most significant here are the drastically
improved shader performance numbers. Poor shader performance has been the
center of some discussion with previous generation FX products, however it
appears that NVIDIA's next generation shader (CineFx 2.0) gives their cards
the much needed boost.

Comparing the "Radeon
9700" to the FX5700 Ultra, we see that the Radeon 9700 beats the FX5700
Ultra in 7 of 9 tests.