NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Chip

The nVidia GeForce FX 5200 Chip
GeForce FX 5200 offers 2 pixel pipelines and 4 texture units. But all this is very relative, because to date you can judge a video card only by the number of pipelines of one type or the other. This is caused by that the driver configures operation of the chip for each particular scene of a computer game.

All in all, we can say the 3D handling potentials in NV34 are not different from those in NV30/31. NV34 supports API DirectX 9, thus shaders 2.0 and 2.0+. There are differences of course: the GeForce FX 5200 chip does not offer IntelliSample optimization.

The memory interface in GeForce FX 5200 is also different from the higher-end brother - NV30. The chip uses a standard DDR memory controller, which in theory results in essential performance drops, especially with the anisotropic filtering and FSAA enabled.

GeForce FX 5200 chips do not have support for the HDTV, but can boast having the integrated TV codec, a TMDS-transmitter and two integrated 350 MHz RAMDACs. But today you are unlikely to surprise anyone with this.

For the long period of its development and short life, the GeForce FX 5200 has changed the "recommended" clock speeds for the core and memory at least 10 times. The problem is the first tests of pre-production samples demonstrated a performance so astonishingly low that it would be out of the question and even fatal to launch video cards in such a bad condition on to the market. We'd better refrain from bringing in those first raw results - that simply won't be fair to nVidia, but I can assure you the results were much lower than for MX440. The cause of that was primarily in buggy Detonator drivers not fit to an entirely new chip architecture and really low clock speeds of the new chips. Gradually, things broke even - the standard recommended clock speeds had to be raised, and every new revision of the driver streamlined the performance of video cards, with the yield ratio was bit by bit coming to reasonable technology norms. In our comparison table in the beginning of the article we brought in the "original" values of core and memory clock speeds, but they may prove different in reality which you can see for yourself buying a card in the shop close to you. Video card manufacturers are not shy about varying these values within wide ranges ...

Direct competitors of the new chips are Radeon 9000 and 9000 Pro which will be soon replaced with Radeon 9200 and 9200 PRO.