Clock Speeds

Now let's take a look at the GPU and memory clock speed.

The NV35 GPU runs at a clock speed of 450MHz, 50MHz lower than the GeForceFX 5800 Ultra's clock speed. However, that doesn't mean that NV35 will perform slower than the NV30.

As I have mentioned in the Specifications section, the GeForceFX 5900 Ultra has an impressive 27.2GB/s of raw memory bandwidth. Coupled with a few architectural improvements and optimizations, it should enable the NV35 to run over the NV30 when it comes to real world performance. The reduced clock speed will also reduce the NV35's power consumption too, thus allowing the GPU to run cooler.

The memory chips are from Hynix. They are rated at 2.2ns which has a nominal speed of 909MHz. Since the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra's memory chips actually run at only 850MHz, these 2.2ns Hynix memory chips should provide us with good headroom for overclocking!

The Detonator FX Driver

In this review, we used the latest WHQL-certified NVIDIA Detonator FX driver version 45.23. This driver follows the new "Optimization Guidelines" NVIDIA fleshed out 2 months ago. First, let's take a look at the Performance & Quality Setting control panel.

These settings apply to both APIs - OpenGL and Direct3D.

There are three settings to choose for the anisotropic filtering option - Performance, Balanced and Quality. As the name suggests, the Performance setting would give us the best performance while the Quality setting would offer us the best image quality. Below the Image setting slider are the Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering options.

With 5900 Ultra, we are now allowed to monitor the temperature of the GPU by using the temperature monitoring panel. You can also set the highest allowed GPU temperature to protect the GPU.