GeForce FX Series - Hardware Refreshes and Diversification

Hardware Refreshes and Diversification

NVIDIA's initial release, the GeForce FX 5800, was intended as a high-end part. There were no GeForce FX products for the other segments of the market. The GeForce 4 MX continued in its role as the budget video card and the older GeForce 4 Ti cards filled in the mid-range.

In April 2003, NVIDIA introduced the GeForce FX 5600 and the GeForce FX 5200 to address the other market segments. Each had an "Ultra" variant and a slower, budget-oriented variant and all used conventional single-slot cooling. The 5600 Ultra had respectable performance overall but it was slower than the Radeon 9600 Pro and sometimes slower than the GeForce 4 Ti series. The FX 5200 did not perform as well as the DirectX 7.0 generation GeForce 4 MX440 or Radeon 9000 Pro in some benchmarks.

In May 2003, NVIDIA launched the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, a new high-end product to replace the low-volume and disappointing FX 5800. Based upon a revised GPU called NV35, which fixed some of the DirectX 9 shortcomings of the discontinued NV30, this product was more competitive with the Radeon 9700 and 9800. In addition to redesigning parts of the GPU, NVIDIA moved to a 256-bit memory data bus, allowing for significantly higher memory bandwidth than the 5800 even when utilizing more common DDR SDRAM instead of DDR2. The 5900 Ultra performed somewhat better than the Radeon 9800 Pro in games not heavily using shader model 2, and had a quieter cooling system than the 5800.

In October 2003, NVIDIA released the GeForce FX 5700 and GeForce FX 5950. The 5700 was a mid-range card using the NV36 GPU with technology from NV35 while the 5950 was a high-end card again using the NV35 GPU but with additional clock speed. The 5950 also featured a redesigned version of the 5800's FlowFX cooler, this time using a larger, slower fan and running much quieter as a result. The 5700 provided strong competition for the Radeon 9600 XT in games limited to light use of shader model 2. The 5950 was competitive with the Radeon 9800 XT, again as long as pixel shaders were lightly used.

In December 2003, NVIDIA launched the GeForce FX 5900XT, a graphics card intended for the mid-range segment. It was similar to the 5900 Ultra, but clocked slower and used slower memory. It more thoroughly competed with Radeon 9600 XT, but was still behind in a few shader-intense scenarios.

The GeForce FX line moved to PCI Express in early 2004 with a number of models, including the PCX 5300, PCX 5750, PCX 5900 and PCX 5950. These cards were largely the same as their AGP predecessors with similar model numbers. To operate on the PCIe bus, an AGP-to-PCIe "HSI bridge" chip on the video card converted the PCIe signals into AGP signals for the GPU.

Also in 2004, the GeForce FX 5200 / 5300 series that utilized the NV34 GPU received a new member with the FX 5500.