Our editors take a sneak peak at the newest members of the GeForce FX family--the 5800 Ultra, 5600 Ultra, and 5200 Ultra.

By now, you've probably heard gamers gripe about Nvidia's method of cooling its next-generation graphics card, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra: it uses an enormously large and loud fan. The fan is so big, in fact, that the card occupies two expansion slots. More troubling for Nvidia is the fact that ATI has trumped the FX 5800 Ultra with the new and significantly faster Radeon 9800 Pro graphics processing unit (GPU). Also problematic: Nvidia announced the US$399 FX 5800 Ultra almost five months ago at Comdex, and retail versions of the card are still in tight supply.

Hopefully, Nvidia can roll out its two additional members of the GeForce FX family--the 5600 Ultra and the 5200 Ultra--in a speedier fashion. (Both cards were announced at last month's Game Developers Conference.) The good news is that each of these eschews the huge cooling fan found on the 5800 Ultra. The US$199 GeForce FX 5600 Ultra is targeted at the mainstream market and should satisfy all but the most serious of gamers. The new GeForce FX 5200 Ultra, on the other hand, replaces the budget GeForce MX series and carries a price of US$149. Those with a casual gaming interest should have little difficulty playing the majority of today's titles with a 5200 Ultra card.

To give you an overview of the new FX line, we had Nvidia send us a preproduction version of each card, including the behemoth 5800 Ultra, and we ran each of them through our benchmarks. For comparison, we tested ATI's new Radeon 9800 Pro along with its previous top card, the Radeon 9700 Pro. We also tested Nvidia's speed leader up to this point, the GeForce4 Ti 4600.

GeForce FX 5800 Ultra
Representing the flagship of Nvidia's latest GPU fleet, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra is leaps and bounds speedier than the fastest GeForce4 card. The GPU is based on a 0.13-micron process, the engine and memory run at an unprecedented 500MHz, and the card utilises cutting-edge DDR-II memory. Unfortunately for Nvidia, the 5800 Ultra is a day late and a dollar short. After numerous manufacturing delays and a very limited release, the 5800 Ultra has taken a backseat to ATI's latest release, the faster Radeon 9800 Pro. Once you start cranking up the resolution and the advanced features, such as antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, the Radeon 9800 Pro takes a definitive lead. In fact, on some tests, the Radeon 9700 Pro kicks out even better performance than the FX 5800 Ultra.

GeForce FX 5600 Ultra Next in line for the FX family is the 5600 Ultra, which focuses squarely on the mainstream market. The 5600 Ultra GPU uses the same 0.13-micron process as the 5800 Ultra, but the 5600 Ultra's engine and memory run at 350MHz, and it uses traditional DDR SDRAM memory. Users who plan on enabling antialiasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering (AF) in their games will see a noticeable performance boost with the 5600 Ultra over the GeForce4 Ti 4600. When these advanced features are not enabled, however, the performance difference isn't as great; in fact, a number of our tests showed occasions where the performance of the Ti 4600 was faster than that of the 5600 Ultra. A word of warning for those who want to play some of the more 3D graphics-demanding games with the card's advanced features enabled: Keep the screen resolutions at or below 1,024x768. Once you start hitting the higher resolutions with AA and AF enabled, frame rates might dip down too low for your liking.

GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
The FX 5200 Ultra shares a number of similar specs with the AGP 8X GeForce4 Ti 4600 GPU. Both cards are built using a 0.15-micron process, both have an engine and memory running at 325MHz, and both support a memory bandwidth of 10.4GB per second. Accordingly, the FX 5200's performance is similar to that of the GeForce4 Ti 4600, and that's not a bad thing. In fact, for an inexpensive, low-end card to generate performance that's close to that of the previous generation's performance leader is not too shabby at all. As you might surmise, however, like the 5600 Ultra, the 5200 Ultra does not fare well at high resolutions with AA and AF enabled on some games.

Copyright © 2009 CBS Interactive, a CBS Company. All Rights Reserved.
ZDNET is a registered service mark of CBS Interactive. ZDNET Logo is a service mark of CBS Interactive.