The graphics-card war is heating up again as Nvidia releases its new GeForce FX 5900, rumoured to be the fastest on the market. Check out our early look.

Kicking off a week of the big gaming news expected from the annual E3 gaming industry conference in Los Angeles, Nvidia yesterday unveiled its new, hotly anticipated high-performance graphics card, the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra. Set to hit stores in June for about US$399 (~AU$618) for the 128MB version (and US$499 (~AU$772) for the 256MB card), the 5900 is being billed as "the industry's fastest graphics processor." But the question is whether it can make up ground lost by its predecessor and help Nvidia reclaim the crown as the king of the graphics cards.

The graphics card race has changed dramatically from a year ago, when Nvidia was the undisputed champ over chief rival ATI. But after suffering from delays in getting out its GeForce FX line on time, and with ATI upping the ante with two strong releases, Nvidia is losing street cred by the day, which was only made worse by the poor performance of the promising GeForce FX 5800.

In our tests, the GeForce FX 5800 had a number of problems and was soundly bested in speed tests by competitor ATI's Radeon 9800. The new GeForce is clearly an attempt to reverse that trend, and Nvidia now says that it has fixed a number of the issues plaguing the poky 5800.

For starters, the 5900 boots the 5800's gigantic, noisy cooling fan; instead, it uses a new cooling system that increases airflow while drastically reducing fan noise. Plus, Nvidia made a move to correct the 5800's poor performance when anisotropic filtering, a technology designed to decrease jagged lines, is activated with Intellisample technology, which supposedly improves image quality when either the card's anisotropic or antialiasing features are in use.

However, speed is the real name of the game, and Nvidia has made a few big changes to push this chip's clocking speed ahead of the pack. For one thing, the new GeForce boasts a 256-bit memory interface, matching ATI's highest end, which should translate to a healthy speed increase over the FX 5800. And the 5900 boasts the addition of new UltraShadow technology, which is designed to allow for quicker rendering of light and shadows in games, making it easier for developers to create shadow effects.

But is this new chip really the fastest game in town? The word on the street (and from Nvidia) is that this card is blazing through benchmarks. CNET's Labs are currently testing this latest addition to Nvidia's GeForce FX family, and we should have our full review next week with more in-depth information and our own testing results. Until then, the jury is still out on whether the GeForce FX 5900 can successfully dethrone ATI's 9800 as the reigning king of speed.

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