Product: Prolink PixelView GeForce FX 5700 with PDF
Manufacturer: Prolink
MSRP: € 199

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With the amount of graphics card reviews that I do each year it's quite a difficult task to surprise me and make me say 'ooh, now that's nice'. It happened to me a while ago when I received a press-release from our friends at Prolink. You know, most graphics card PCB's these days are 99% the same. Performance therefore at exactly the same level also. Little differences that we need to be weary off, can be found in the little details like a slightly different clock frequency for the graphics core, faster/slower rated memory, the software bundle, little extra's DVI dongles and of course, it's cooling solution. The past year or two we clearly have noticed that innovative cooling solutions are become a trend. With a cooling solution you can set yourself at a different level compared to the competition. I mean, MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS, Hercules, Albatron Gainward, Prolink .. they all try to differentiate themselves from each other. Prolink however did something new in this genre and developed something mysterious called PDF.

That last word of the previous sentence is what this Prolink PixelView card is all about, whether there would be a GeForce FX 5200 or 5600 hidden in that package you almost don't care as this is pure beauty to look at. Fortunately there's a GeForce FX 5700 (codename NV36) under the hood armed with no less than 256 MB memory. So, today's product we are going to review is the Prolink GeForce FX 5700 armed with video in/out, 256 MB memory and a sub 25dB cooling solution which is equipped with something that is called PDF, no no .. not the Adobe one, it's called Plasma Display Fan. I hear you say .. 'Say waah ?' Hey don't ask me either .. plasma ?

The PDF is a combination of a LED and LCD. And that LED illuminated fan is used to cool down the card, With PDF you can also read the GPU temperature and rotational speed of the fan. Pretty interesting stuff huh ?

Armed with 256 MB DDR memory and a simple software bundle Prolink is making a daring yet interesting move here, and I like that in a manufacturer. But first let's have a little chat about the GeForce FX 5700 technology, also known under development codename NV36. On the 23rd of October NVIDIA launched two new products, both to be found in the mid- and high end range of products, respectively the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and the mid-range 5700 (Ultra). Both products are based on the NV3x generation, the 5950 had a small core clock and memory frequency increase, the 5700 however had slight design changes in it's chipset architecture.

In today's article I'll present you an overview of the 5700 with the help of a nice photo shoot, overview of the ForceWare drivers and then of course we'll dig into our benchmark suite where we have tested the card in both RAW and quality setting 8x Anisotropic filtering + Anti aliasing at four levels. That's not it though, in the article we are going to compare the new cards with almost all other GeForce FX cards and we'll throw in a couple of popular Radeon 9x00 cards as well. So this will be a very competitive review ...

The GeForce FX 5700 is the follow-up of the somewhat disappointing FX 5600 series and a product that is lined up against ATI's Radeon 9600 XT. Right now, value for money wise, the 5700 and the new 5900XT series will be the most interesting NVIDIA products for the most of you. I

Let's get started.

The Product
The GeForce FX 5700 (Ultra) has basically a slightly altered NV35 (GeForce FX 5900) graphics core and is armed with two pixel shader engines and a new geometry engine which makes it an even more competitive product with ATI's Radeon 9600 XT. The architecture did not change extremely, though, it's still based on the NV35, however, with 4 pixel pipelines, and a 130nm core as it's base of operations. This is the product that was manufactured at IBM. The product has more vertex processing power compared to the GeForce FX 5600, and is capable of handling DDR1/DDR2 and GDDR3 when needed.

The card is covered with Prolinks new cooling solution, again very silent with it's Noise Reduction Technology (around 25dB) and yet very effective. The cooling solution is designed to prevent air being blocked by other PCI card.

The solid gold colored sink covers the graphics core and memory 100%, the backside is cooled by a metal plate. The fan on the front has a variable RPM, this means the hotter the card is getting the faster it'll spin. The cooling solution has a temperature diode built in. When the GPU fan speed is below 1000RPM or it's temperature is higher than 70 Degrees C an audio alarm will be turned on automatically.

Hold on a second .... yeah that audio alarm works !

Just halted the fan from rotating. Speaking of the fan, to spice things up a bit more a blue LED is emitting light from it. Same thing happens on the LCD display. That LCD Display is also called 'Blue Icy Crystal Displayer' and you can read the graphics core temperature and fan speed (RPM) from it. What a really awesome design.

Memory and core, the core is now at a very impressive 425 MHz where the memory is doing 600 (2x 600) MHz. That means good computational power and very decent memory bandwidth for a mid-range product. Interesting fact is that this product has been equipped with 256 MB of DDR memory, it's 128-bit though. The product will be available in the stores by next month. The product will have a ~ 199 USD pricetag and will be competing mostly with ATI's Radeon 9600 series.

In the box we'll find the Prolink FX 5700 equipped with 256MB memory, AGP x8/x4/x2 interface, this product has a 128-bit memory bus. Furthermore it sports D-Sub, TV-in/out and DVI Ports. It has a traditional colored PCB PDF cooling solution. Looking at the cards layout I would say the board is 100% based on NVIDIA's reference design.

Mounted into the heatsink we can notice a nice decorative bright blue LEDs which emits light to it's ambient surroundings. The cooling solution is downright nice, and also very important silent, the PCI slot below the graphics card is completely free to use. On the back we can see one heatsink over each pair of the memory chips.

The Bundle
In the box we'll find a the following software: CD with driver software and optional PowerDirector ME and WinDVD 4 from InterVideo. Nothing too flashy, Powercolor clearly is willing to keep the price down by excluding lots of extra software.

The Installation
It's really not hard to install a graphics card yourself nowadays. Especially with brands like ATI and NVIDIA who use unified driver sets. If you have a really new product then make sure you have the latest drivers on your HD. First uninstall your current graphics cards drivers carefully, this is very important especially if the older graphics was from a different chipset manufacturer. Now power down the PC and pull out the power cable. Insert the graphics card in the slot, secure it with a screw, connect the monitor and boot up windows, run the driver installation, then restart and you are set to go. That's all. Also important, make sure you have the latest version of DirectX (9) installed.

Below you can notice the differences between the FX 5700 and the FX 5700 Ultra model. There's quite a big difference in memory bandwidth that will definitely demand its toll.

Let's calculate memory bandwidth:

(2x128bit) x (600MHz:2) : 8bit = 9600 MB/sec which is 4800 MB/sec less then the Ultra model.

Let's see what the products looks like with a series of photos that we took, all nude baby! All images you see are posted under guru3d.com copyright, please do not use or deeplink them. The photos have been taken with a Sony DCS F707 at a high resolution and have been scaled down towards 1024x768. You may click on the images to see the image in that resolution. The full images are high-quality, that means file-size can be 200-300 kB

Prolink PixelView GeForce FX 5700 with PDF.

Backside view, nice clean design. The wire you see there is actually a thermal probe used by the cooling system.

Frontside view of the card. From left to right you'll notice the CRT, SVideo (in/out) and DVI-I connectors.

When we flip the card around we can see that the Molex connecter is somewhat unusually placed

Here we see the Molex connector up-close. You hook it up to your power supply. Something that will likely be gone with PCI Express next year.

Some extra photos to show PDF cooling a tad better.

Here we can notice the LCD screen that will read out the GPU temperature and RPm of the active fan.

The card is not a 'closed' system. When we look at the bottom you can easily look into the 'interior'. The idea of PDF basically is to shield the card from outside heat from for example a PCI card. That idea works though as the measured temperature never exceeded 44 Degrees C.

When we power up the test rig we can see all whistles and bells turn on. Who needs a Christmas tree eh ?

When it is getting a bit darker the card is a a beauty to observe. It's really nice in your average case-mod with side window.

Here we can see the LCD display. The temeratures went from idle towards 100% GPU load. The fan actaully starts out at 4000 RPM and will speed up the minute the card is getting a tad warmer. It's really funny to observe.

When you read this review you'd almost think we had forgotten it is a VIVO graphics card. Svideo & Video in/outputs are connected to this splitter. Which of course is connected to the graphics card. Once you've installed the NVIDIA WDM driver you can use the card to record your home movies or whatever through this connection with appropriate software.

The New ForceWare Drivers
The upcoming pages, you'll see screenshots of the new ForceWare (previously know as Detonator) drivers. The driver we used is based on the new 52.xx series, in fact the 52.16 driver to be precise. Let's have a look. Small sidenote, the driver screenshots you see are based on the Ultra model. Except for the core and memory clock frequency they are 100% the same.

The standard information, as you can notice we used the GeForceFX 5700 Ultra here, the driver build as supplied by NVIDIA was version 52.16 This build is very stable, installs easy as counting 1-2-3 but foremost we believe has really good image quality.

First up, OpenGL. Pretty much nothing changed here compared to the previous builds. Let's quickly move on towards the Direct3D tab.

The Direct3D settings. Again nothing new to find here. More important settings for Image Quality are handled in another tab for both OpenGL and Direct3D. When we unlock the drivers we do get another Direct3D tab though, take a look at the next slide.

This actually is a hidden tab. You can enable it by downloading the Hidden Features patch from our Detonator driver file section. On the third page of these driver screenshots you'll see a lot of other hidden options also. Why this tab is so secret and hidden I really do not know.

Here we see extended settings, you can lock and set the refresh-rate for all your resolutions. No more flickering in and headaches due to gameplay in 60Hz refreshes.

Look at the tabs, and you'll notice that performance is set at Quality by default where it now offers a “High Performance”, “Performance” and “Quality” mode for your Image Quality versus performance preference.

Here you can select Anti Aliasing (AA) up-to 8xS skewed grid modes and Anisotropic Filtering modes (AF) to 8x. Take note of the fact that the Texture sharpening setting that will crank up the AF one level has been removed.

The “High Performance” mode offers users the highest frame rate possible.
“Performance” mode offers users a blend between image quality and performance.
“Quality” mode offers users the highest image quality while still delivering very good performance.

Digital Vibrance and color/contrast settings. A most welcome yet somewhat older feature

Monitor timings, leave it alone. Set it at Auto Detect, again something for an 'advanced' mode

Slightly changed: Overlay control. Important for media playback as for example DVD.

Here's a new one also, you can now center/adjust the screen's position.

When you own a TFT that can rotate/flip, you know what to do here. Also pretty nice features for (retro) projection.

As you know we always try to take it one step further, hey we are Guru3D.com. Several properties are hidden at default and for the advanced users among us these settings are quite interesting, you can enable it by downloading the Hidden Features patch from our Detonator driver file section. The results are additional options as shown below:

The entire GeForce FX range has a temperature probe, you can now monitor temperature level which is a really nice feature. The temperature displayed above is the 5700 Ultra in idle in a closed case. When you try to toast the graphics card to it's max the temperature will rise towards about 60-65 Degrees C which is not bad at all. Look at that Core Slowdown Threshold notification. It's amazing that the GPU can pull such high temperatures

New layout, here you can see you can check and change AGP settings in here and functions like Fast Writes. Quite important if you experience stability issues, not something you should tamper with on the fly though

There are two tabs if you want to overclock with the help of the standard drivers. Leave 2D alone, 3D is what you care about for gaming performance. If you want to overclock without the use the Detonator driver properties then use a 3rd party utility like RivaTuner or NVHardpage. Also, take note of that Auto Detect feature. The card will actually detect the fastest possible overclock for you ! That's tweaking made easy.

So, just click it, sit back and relax .. and your card will be overclocked automatically. It's quite accurate to be honest, don't rely on the end result too much though. I also recommend to use this feature once your system has been warmed up (ambient PC case temperature). So go play a game for at least fifteen minutes and then use this function.

Clock settings in 2D mode. As stated, leave them alone

Media Playback
A much forgotten item in reviews nowadays is of course multimedia/movie playback. In an old review, I believe it was GeForce3, I stated that NVIDIA should take a good look at ATI when talking about dual monitor setups and movie playback through the S-Video connector. Well, NVIDIA did that and more even since GeForce 4.
Seriously, movie playback over video-output has improved heaps over previous generations. I can start stories about what and why this has changed, the new driver 'tweaks' bob and weave interlacing etc ... But basically it's all way too much blah blah and well, this review is already a tad longer then our normally also way too long reviews anyway (seriously you are not even half way through the review yet, did you grab a cup of coffee already?).

Images taken with GeForce FX from the movie: Red Dragon - JPEG compression makes it a bit fuzzy. These are DiVX screenshots.

Basically, all you need to know is that playback is now truly at a level that can compare equally with ATI's Radeon playback. DVD playback quality was good and performance wise handled at videocard level as CPU utilization during playback is very low.

Performance & Overclocking
Before we dive into a large series of benchmarks we need to discuss overclocking. With most videocards, we can do some easy tricks to boost the overall performance a little. It's called overclocking the videocard, and by increasing the frequency of the videocards memory and gpu we can make the videocard increase it's calculation clock cycles per second. It sounds hard but it really can be done in less then a few minutes. I always tend to recommend to novice users and beginners not to increase that frequency any higher then 5-10% of the core and memory clock. Example: If your card would run at 300 MHz then I suggest you don't increase that frequency any higher than 330 MHz.

More advanced users push that frequency often way higher. Usually when memory starts to show white dots 'snow' you should go down 10 MHz and leave it at that. The core can be somewhat different. Usually when you are clocking to hard it'll start to show artifacts, empty polygons or it will even freeze. I recommend that you back down at least 15 MHz from the moment you notice an artifact. Look carefully and observe well.

All in all .. do it at your own risk. Overclocking your card too fast or constantly to it's limit might damage your card and it's not covered by your warranty.

You will benefit from overclocking the most with a product that is limited or you may called it 'tuned down'. We know that this graphics core is often limited by tact frequency or bandwidth limitation, therefore by increasing the memory and core frequency we should be able to witness some higher performance results. A simply trick to get some more bang for your bucks.

The GeForce FX 5700 from Prolink, at standard 128-bit 256 MB DDR memory runs at default 425 MHz for the core and 300 MHz (x2) for it's memory. The 5700 was a reasonable overclocker with 470 MHz as core frequency and again 710 MHz for the memory.

These settings have been used throughout our entire benchmark suite. That means that each card has been tested in the overclocked conditions in twenty-eight individual tests without corruption or weirdness in the form of system hangs.

Both cards are consistent in all benchmarks and that's 56 single test-runs.

made in 32 bit colors in resolutions ranging from 800x600 pixels up-to the Godfather of all gaming resolutions, the 1600x1200 several performance/quality settings
All tests were .

FireStarter In FireStarter, your character is engaging in play on a convincing virtual-reality simulator when a virus is introduced into the computer system. The system goes haywire, at once generating fierce monsters that attack you while simultaneously rendering you unable to disconnect from the virtual world. You must complete each level within a specific time period to have any hope of escaping the confines of this computer-generated place in a semi DirectX 8.1 and 9 environment. Particle systems: Particle systems, explosions, projectile flight effects are made of basic effects and can be as much complex as needed All effects are plug-ins Standardized protocol for effect programming 11 basic effects as spray, splinters, flashes, trigger, etc. Simple mechanism of building effects in the levels and binding to entity of the level. Programmable recurrence of the effects

Level effects:
Steam, smoke, fire, geyser and other effects based on the particle systems
Realistic localized volumetric fog with the possibility of camera-view from inside and outside
Global volumetric fog throughout the whole level without level geometry and used shaders constraints
Lighting with omni, directed, volumetric light, lighting with skybox
Dynamic light
Projected textures
Detailing textures
Halo, radiance around the sources of light
Shaders:
Standard script language for creation of multi-pass/multitexture shaders
Standard procedural deformations of the vertex coordinates
Standard procedural deformations of the texture coordinates
Standardized interface for embedding shader effects (renders), which use the latest video accelerator possibilities as programmable vertex/pixel conveyers.
Plug-ins for effects with diffuse/specular bump-mapping, EMBM, anisotropic lighting, etc., that support several rendering techniques for any hardware acceleration (starting with Riva TNT2)
Original rendering algorithm for large amount of static and dynamic geometry
Procedural textures as water, fire, plasma, etc.

Didn't the Prodigy have a song with this title ? Anyway, I received this application from GSC Game World not too long ago. A limitation is that right now we can only benchmark at 1024x768 and 1280x1024. I quickly benchmarked a few other cards with it. Since it's so new we can know for sure no specific driver cheats are activated (yet). The R9600 is a Radeon 9600 non XT/Pro. It's the non pro version equipped with 256MB memory. The Pro/XT version are faster. As you can see the FX 5700 is doing really cool stuff here. For the upper region (high-end) cards I chose a Radeon 9800 Pro and GeForce FX 5950 as comparison. Since the game uses DX9 shaders we can see ATI on the move. The FX 5700 is of course the GeForce FX 5700 from Prolink.

And for your information, FireStarter has not yet been released. More info can be found here.

Splinter Cell In our Benchmark suite is the very popular game Splinter Cell. Making a believable world for a spy to play in is quite a daunting task, but the levels are varied, filled with appropriate objects, and designed so that you usually don’t have to choose between too many paths. It would’ve been great if you could’ve had several points of entrance and that way get a lot more replay-value. Sam and the rest of the characters do look terrific, with high polygon models and both crisp and appropriate looking textures. What really separates Splinter Cell from most recent action games is the use of shadows. Splinter Cell uses the Unreal engine, which we’ve seen in several great looking games the past months, but UbiSoft also added improved lighting. By using real-time cast shadows, lightmaps, etc, this title gives you some of the best looking shadows to date. In response to the growing use of sophisticated digital encryption to conceal potential threats to the national security of the United States, the NSA (National Security Agency) has ushered forth a new dawn of intelligence-gathering techniques. This top-secret initiative is dubbed Third Echelon. Denied to exist by the U.S. government, Third Echelon deploys elite intelligence-gathering units consisting of a lone field operative supported by a remote team. Like a sliver of glass, a Splinter Cell is small, sharp, and nearly invisible. You have the right to spy, steal, destroy and assassinate, to ensure that American freedoms are protected. If captured, the U.S. government will disavow any knowledge of your existence. You are Sam Fisher. You are a Splinter Cell

Splinter Cell has two shadowing techniques, projector and Buffer mode. We force Projector mode in high detail on all graphics cards. Again, graphics cards without shader capabilities will run into a problem as they do not support it. We are talking about GeForce4 MX and earlier models only. With that in mind this software really is an excellent benchmark. Small sidenote, we are not using the standard timedemo's. We made one ourselves that stresses the filtrate of a graphics card and will utilize a CPU very little. Let's take a look at some of the benchmark numbers. Unlike some of the future games, Splinter Cell doesn’t use per-pixel lighting, so the framerate should be quite good even for owners of mid-end PCs.

First of let me again explain the names to be able to understand the charts, we left out the brand names (words) Radeon & GeForce to save a little space. The second entry in the chart states 9600 256, this means that the product was a Radeon 9600 with 256 MB memory. All results are done with the help of a Pentium 4 2.8 C class (800 MHz FSB) CPU with the help of 400 MHz Dual channel DDR memory (review here). The results are looking acceptable for the 5700 Ultra, as you can see it got a nice performance bump over the 5600 series. As expected the FX 5950 leads the chart yet the 5700 has a really hard time. Splinter Cell is a DirectX 8 and 9 title and can handle Pixel Shaders if your card supports it. The downside of this nice piece of software is that it has different modes for different classes of hardware.

We left out the results for Anti Aliasing in this particular benchmark. The lighting model causes odd visible rendering errors within AA and reproduces odd results. Ubisoft posted and confirmed this on their website.

AquaMark 3 The latest graphics cards on the market are almost all DirectX9 compatible these days, and we also see an increasing number of games utilizing the new DX9 features. To be able to see how well a graphics cards is performing in this new challenging DirectX 9 environment, AquaMark was developed. The AquaMark3 benchmark delivers scores for specific hardware components as well as an overall score for the entire system. AquaMark3 is highly qualified to meet the needs of gamers because it's as close as possible to a typical game application. The AquaMark benchmarking series is based directly on the huge code and data base of the AquaNox games and the underlying krass? game engine." In the past we have used AquaMark 2.3 in our benchmark suite and although still a reputable application, Massive figured it was time for the next best thing. This is AquaMark 3, a benchmark that will utilize some of the finest DirectX 9 capabilities like Pixel and Vertex Shaders 2.0, and yet is by far not as Shader dependant as Half-Life is, for example. You will notice that in the overall results later in this article. AquaMark 3, however, is not solely a DirectX9 benchmark; if you are working with a DirectX 8 or 7 compatible graphics card, you will still be able to use it just with a lot of graphical features missing. Make no mistake, AquaMark3 is a DirectX 9 benchmark. But since it's based on a real game engine it has fallbacks to DirectX 8 and even DirectX 7 making this software not a 100% DX9 benchmark.

As you can see, pretty similar results compared to Splinter Cell. The NVIDIA series clearly have the edge here. Again look at that really nice performance the 5700 is capable of. That's really nice to see for a sub-199 USD product. Things will change when we turn on 4x Antialiasing and 8x Anisotropic Filtering (AA and AF from now on).

Compared to the 5600 the 5700 again impresses me yet is not capable of doing really useful numbers. It pulls ahead of the Radeon 9600 Pro.
The numbers in red represent the results of the card when overclocked.

 

Return to Castle Wolfenstein Powered with a highly optimized Quake III engine, high detail settings and of course a heavy time-demo to get test results will will now use this software. Powered by the Quake III Arena engine, the Wolfenstein universe explodes with the kind of epic environments, A.I., firepower and cinematic effects that only a game created by true masters can deliver. The dark reich's closing in. The time to act is now. Evil prevails when good men do nothing. a highly decorated Army Ranger recruited into the Office of Secret Actions (OSA) tasked with escaping and then returning to Castle Wolfenstein in an attempt to thwart Heinrich Himmler's occult and genetic experiments. Himmler believes himself to be a reincarnation of a 10th century dark prince, Henry the Fowler, also known as Heinrich. Through genetic engineering and the harnessing of occult powers, Himmler hopes to raise an unstoppable army to level the Allies once and for all.

That being said, RTCW boasts very nice textures, impressive effects and fantastic character models. At this point not many videocards have been included in this specific comparison, there will be when time passes of course.

Again, we can see some really nice numbers. Although marginal, the 5700 is again doing really impressive numbers as it's even closing in on the 9700 Pro. Let's observe the score with quality settings.

Again really good performance, the 5950 Ultra remains on top of the list and again, the 5700 is a hoot with such quality settings and a resolution of 1600x1200 it still manages to push out 100 frames per second. And if you don't believe in memory bandwidth limitation, have a look at the overclocked results and higher image quality results below, nice.

Halo: Combat Evolved Those of you who haven't heard about HALO raise your hands please; you?! What do you mean you haven't heard about it?! Oh you're still gaming on a Dreamcast; daddy is a game reviewer, you say, and can't afford to buy you anything? Oh well, I guess we can let this one slide. HALO was probably the biggest and certainly the most prominent launch title for Microsoft's Xbox console. You also probably know that Bungie actually originally intended to publish the game on the PC, but were kindly asked to change their mind, well ... bought by MS and help the birth of the Xbox. After two years of waiting, PC gamers can finally sink their teeth into the PC version of the game. In Halo, you don the armor of the Master Chief; a war-hardened soldier that only comes out when the going gets really tough. The Earth is at war with a mysterious race called the Covenant and as the game opens, a Halcyon-class cruiser from Earth, the Pillar of Autumn, has dropped out of warp badly damaged. Worse yet, the Autumn is being pursued by a Covenant fleet. The Master Chief is given the mandate to get the ship’s main computer construct, Cortana, away from the cruiser as the captain crashes the battered Pillar of Autumn on a strange ring-shaped object (later to be known as Halo). You must get Cortana off of the Autumn and then keep yourself alive long enough figure out what secrets Halo hides.

Now, with the game in public release, most of you will find the performance to be still pretty demanding. The game's use of pixel shader 2.0 causes a lot of disbelieve for Nvidia GeForce FX owners. On the bright side, Nvidia scrambled to optimize their drivers and version 52.16, which we used in our benchmarks, has some significant performance enhancements over the older 45.XX series.

Bungie decided to upgrade the engine in the PC version to support Pixel Shader 2.0 effects instead of the Pixel Shader 1.1 effects found on the Xbox version. This is noticeable in better shiny armor, water effects and better looking grass. To run Halo on the PC requires a pretty high end system.

As you can see, extremely few results here. The reason that the 5700 ultra does not have two results was due to the fact that our mass benchmark application was not 100% compatible with Halo at that time. In time the results will become more and more extensive. As it'll become a common benchmark. As you can see the 5700 has an extremely hard time dealing with this new DX9 title.

Unreal II: The Awakening New in our benchmark suite is Unreal II -The Awakening. The reason we include this software as a benchmark is again related to driver-optimisations. Compared towards Unreal 2003 it's not commonly used as test-software and therefore excellent to test products with.

You play John Dalton, an ex-marine now working as a space marshal for the Terran Colonial Authority. Dalton leads a rag-tag group of fellow ex-marines and one alien navigator aboard the ship Atlantis, charged with the task of patrolling the outer-reaches of space to quell any trouble that may crop up on any of the scattered colonies on his patrol. Another plus point is an incredible graphics engine capable of producing some of the most glorious and breath-taking graphics to date. This engine is put to good use with some inspired level designs of vast proportions, many filled with intricately designed structures and endless beauty. Character models here have a roundness and human warmth in their textures and coloration that make them almost leap off the screen. They're more cartoon-like than photo-realistic, although they have a peculiarly vivid presence that tops anything we've seen. They also don't have those bulky "Quake hands" sported by every human and humanoid denizen of a first-person shooter since 1996, so bonus points have to be awarded for that aesthetic alone

Well, you can't win them all. The 5950 Ultra has to forfeit its performance to the might 9800 Pro. The 5700 is still doing nice numbers. Let's look at AA and AF.

Very similar results here, the game of course remains very playable. The 5700 is still in front of the 9600 Pro, although marginal. The GeForce FX 5950 Ultra caves in even below 9700 pro performance.

The 5700 is handling the game on a very acceptable level for a mid range product. A few technical improvements in Unreal II include texture compression, alpha blending, distance fog, advanced particle physics with forces and particle collisions, and per-poly collision detection for characters.

 

Serious Sam Second Encounter The Serious Engine can render huge distances and complex architecture. It is not enough to just make things big. You need to have both large scale architecture and small scale details at the same time. We can render huge towns, beautiful terrains and complex rooms. Reconstruction of ancient Egyptian temple complex at Karnak (from Serious Sam) demonstrates sense of scale and complexity of architecture. SE is very much like the Quake3 engine in the terms of OpenGL calls. But, since SE is more complicated than Q3Engine, it requires some more OpenGL functions. Pictures from Serious Engine may look awkward, different from what you can see elsewhere. That's because they are filled with bright, natural colors. Serious Engine has powerful lighting and texturizing abilities, so we can avoid dark, gray, nihilistic colors. Ability to create bright, realistic scenes does not imply that dark and moody atmospheres cannot be achieved. On the contrary, Serious Engine has ability to create moody scenes at least comparable with competitive engines. The Serious Engine has shadow rendering algorithms so powerful that it calculates shadows as you move lights in editor. That is extremely important when decorating interiors. You do not have to wait any more to see how your world will look. In the Serious Engine, shadows are always up to date. If you add a column, it will immediately cast shadows.

Serious Sam is powered by 'Serious engine' featuring state of the art technology including:

• Both complex indoor and outdoor scenes in one engine,
• Multiple direction gravity,
• Advanced LOD for loads of enemies at the same time,
• Directional light for daylight scenes,
• Portals and mirrors,
• Truly dynamic volumetric fog and haze,
• Both skinned and multi-part models combined,
• Hyper-texturing and hyper-mapping for life-like richly detailed environments,
• High polygon count multi-resolution meshes,
• Photo-realistic lens flares with real-time lens reflections,
• Advanced particle system,
• Procedural textures (water, fire, smoke, plasma, electricity),
• Photo-realistic reflections, specularity and bumps,
  

Right, let's take a look at the performance that we measured with Serious Sam the Second encounter

In Serious Sam the tide is turning towards NVIDIA again. The card produces really excellent numbers in this test, even at 1600x1200x32 resolution where it does 31 frames per second with quality settings enabled.

Unreal 2003
The Unreal Tournament 2003 benchmark is much more modern than Quake III, this is not the Unreal 2003 performance test as used by some other websites; contrary to that, it's based on the demo.

Since the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo is finally out, and available for a free download. You can get it at just about any file download site (link). Be prepared to download 100MB of data though. One nice little addition to UT2003 demo is that it has a built-in benchmark utility. You can find the benchmark in the system subdirectory for the game after it installs. The file is appropriately named 'benchmark.exe'. Run this file, select the resolution you want to benchmark, and it will go through 4 different demos, 2 are "flyby" and 2 are "botmatch" demos. The flyby demos give you an idea of how high frame rates would be without bots, while the botmatch demos give you an idea of what kind of fps you can expect while actually playing the game. The benchmark actually leverages more cpu and graphics intensive technologies that the engine is capable of. To prevent manufacturer graphics driver cheatibg we use our own internal timedemo though.

The 5700 Ultra is very capable of handling this game as you can see, and it's a rough one on the graphics core alright. The 5950 Ultra is again, on top. Even with quality settings AF and AA enabled we still see awesome numbers.

The 5700 keeps a competitive edge over the 9600 Pro and again is getting closer to the 9700 Pro. 10x7 is the maximum resolution to play the game with 4xAA and 8x AF though.

Quake III Arena Quake III Arena, what a revolution this game was when it got released. Now it has become a standard by itself as solid and respectable benchmark utility for journalists .. The game that everybody knows is naturally Quake III Arena. Seriously, who doesn't own it or at least has played it once ? Q3A is of course an excellent game to use as benchmark. It's an up-to-date game and has new options available to test the card to it's maximum. We used the standard Demo001 timedemo. We tested the videocard with Quake3 Arena in High Quality mode, 32 Bit colors. Available resolutions we tested where 800x600 up to 1600x1200 with quality settings set to maximum. Of course, there are far better benchmarks than Quake III, yet this benchmark always places a graphics card in the right perspective performance wise. Yes, we do not need 200 frames per second, but this benchmark scales the difference in graphics cards just so very nice. More modern and Graphics Core demanding games would, of course, produce much lower results

It's still interesting to see that from the moment we started using our own timedemo's the scores dropped bigtime in Quake III. The results are of course by far still excellent.

Even with AA and AF enabled at a high level the 5700 remains doing really kick'ass numbers. Anything above 50-60 Frames per second for any game is more than sufficient even at 1600x1200x32 the game is very playable with quality settings enabled. Right, let's go to the conclusion.

Conclusion Prolink truly did something truly unique with this graphics card, the dandy cooling system makes this a classy product with a very competitive edge in the mid-range market. It will performs nicely for a product in that price-range, I do have to make a small hint towards the 5900 series though, and I'd also like to state that a faster Ultra model of this 5700 product is in the same price range. If you are asking me what to buy, I'd suggest you go for an Ultra model as it'll get you a little performance edge over a mid-range product. The 5900 series is falling in price quickly and especially with the new 5900XT model you'll definitely have a better choice over the 5700 series. Keep that in mind when you are about to buy a 5700 product, compare prices and features people

Where the 5600 series, in my eye, lacked performance.. the 5700 makes it up for it. With this graphics card you'll be able to play any game to date without any big performance issues. New DX9 titles are already running out of strength with this card though. If you don't care about that then this product is for you. Especially when you have a case-mod or case with side-door window. The Plasma Display Fan cooling is simply breathtaking, innovative and alone almost worth buying the card for. The R&D team of Prolink deserved two thumbs up for that.

I must add that we had the somewhat more expensive 200 USD version in our test-lab. That meant video in- and output and of course 256 MB memory which unfortunately is not well spent money on a product in this product class. The 5700 is definitely not meant for the hardcore gamer, but the ones that occasionally do play a game or two. Combine that with video in and output function, dual monitor options and let us not forget excellent DVD/Media playback, peachy fine 2D quality and a product that has the looks that can kill bill

The PDF combined with a quality design, fine features and very stable solution makes a this product an excellent one to buy. I grant it our Editor's Choice, very stable, acceptable price and a fantastic cooling solution that deserves every bit of credit I can give. Thanks to Prolink for giving us the opportunity to review their products. Product: Prolink PixelView GeForce FX 5700 with PDF Manufacturer: Prolink MSRP: € 199

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