What NVIDIA did was clever, the 5700 Ultra got a really nice performance bump over the 5600 series, and it moves closer towards the high-end performing cards. Of course, it won't perform at that level, but what I thought was missing in the 5600 series this product is making up for it. In fact this product (as you will see) is closing in on Radeon 9700 Pro performance.

The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra has basically a slightly altered NV35 graphics core and is armed with two pixel shader engines and a new geometry engine. 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 a very nice new cooling solution, again very silent yet very effective, the solid metal sink covers the graphics core and memory. Speaking about memory and core ,the clock frequencies have been moved up by quite a bit. The core is now at a very impressive 475 MHz where the memory is doing 900 (2x 450) MHz. That means more computational power and very decent memory bandwidth for a mid-range product. Interesting fact is that this product has been equipped with 128 MB of DDR2 memory, it's 128-bit though. The product will be available in the stores by next month. The product will have a very interesting 199 USD pricetag and will be competing mostly with ATI's Radeon 9600 series.

GeForce FX 5700 Ultra   Codename NV36 Core Clock 475 MHz Memory Clock 450 MHz Memory Interface 128-bit DDR2 Frame Buffer Size 128 MB Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 14.4 Fill Rate (texels/sec) 1.9 Billion Vertices/sec 356 Million Thermal Silent, single-slot Fansink