Inno3D Tornado GeForce FX 5600 Ultra - 128mb

Manufacturer: InnoVision
Supplied by: InnoVision
Street Price: est $200

by Dean Barker  (6/19/2003)

Introduction

The entire GeForce FX family has been slow to come to market so far.  The exception being the GeForce FX 5200 products, which are now readily available.  The 5200 cards are the latest generation of the old MX line offering acceptable performance at a reasonably inexpensive price; currently around $100.  What I mean by “acceptable performance” is that all models in the FX lineup, including the low end of the spectrum 5200, are fully DX9 compliant.  Upcoming game titles will certainly be embracing DX9 features as opposed to the lukewarm reception of DX8 by programmers.  As such, your next upgrade really should be a DX9 compliant product to ensure your next card will have some amount of useable life expectancy.  For those of you wanting a more balanced performer than the budget conscious FX 5200, the 5600/Ultra and 5800/Ultras are beginning to be seen at store shelves with increasing frequency.  The 5600 series is aimed at the end user wanting good performance and to stay on a somewhat restrictive budget ($200 or so.)  It offers several performance advantages over its little brother the 5200/Ultra.  The die is down from the 0.15 of the 5200/Ultra to 0.13 microns on the 5600/Ultra.  The RAMDAC is also up from 350MHz to 400MHz.  As far as high end pricing is concerned, I for one am not willing to spend north of 400 clams on a VGA card, so the middle of the road pricing and performance is very appealing.  This was the exact reason for the popularity of the GeForce 4 Ti-4200 cards.  Before we get too far along, we wish to extend our thanks to Inno3D for making this review possible.  Let’s start things out with some white paper info.

Specifications

• Powered by nVidia GeForce FX 5600 Ultra GPU (NV31)
• Available in 64MB / 128MB / 256MB DDR Memory configuration
• 0.13 Micron Process Technology
• Intellisample™ Technology
• CineFX™ engine
• 128-bit studio-precision color
• Architected for Cg
• Core clock speed of 351MHz
• Memory clock speed of 702MHz
• AGP 8X -2.1GB/s bandwidth to system
• NVIDIA’s nView™ multi-display technology
• Digital Vibrance Control (DVC) 3.0
• 400MHz RAMDACs support 2048x1536 resolution at 75MHz
• 4 Pixels/Clock Rendering Pipeline
• Pixel Shader and Vertex Shader 2.0
• New 64-phase Video Scaler
• DVI output up to 1600x1200
• Integrated TV encoder up to 1024x768 resolution
• Integrated full hardware MPEG-2 decoder
• nVIDIA® Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
• Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Optimizations and Support
• OpenGL® 1.4 Optimizations and Support

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