Nvidia Corp. is using this week’s E3 Expo in Los Angeles to debut the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, a new flagship graphics processor aimed at consumers. The new chip sports remarkably higher performance characteristics than its predecessors, according to the information offered by Nvidia.
The GeForce FX 5900 Ultra sports a 256-bit memory interface, the CineFX 2.0 pixel shading engine, 128-bit color precision, floating-point precision, and support for the latest features in the OpenGL specification, used by Apple to power Mac OS X’s graphics technology.
Nvidia said the new GeForce FX 5900 Ultra sports 27.2GB/sec memory bandwidth, 3.6 billion texels/sec. fill rate, and the ability to process 338 million vertices/sec. By comparison, the previous high-end GeForce FX chip sported 11.2GB/sec. memory bandwidth; 1.4 billion texels/sec. fill rate, and the ability to process 88 million vertices/sec. The GeForce FX line made its debut last year, and has been plagued with production delays since its release.
While the announcements regarding the chip are specific to the PC market, the new GeForce FX 5900 Ultra could be used in future Macintosh designs, thanks to Nvidia’s use of a unified architecture that’s made all of its chip designs since the GeForce2 MX Mac-compatible.
Nvidia anticipates shipping the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra in June.
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