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GeForce FX 5200 Reviewed

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the polys-per-second dept.

EconolineCrush writes "Tech Report has a great in-depth review of NVIDIA's budget GeForce FX 5200, which brings full DirectX 9 support down to an amazing sub-$70 price point. Any budget graphics card capable of running NVIDIA's gorgeous Dawn is impressive on its own, but when put under the microscope, the GeForce FX 5200 looks more like an exercise in marketing spin than a real revolution for budget graphics cards."

6 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. Re:two words by bobbozzo · · Score: 4, Informative

    It isn't an MX.
    The MX's had fewer features; this one is full-featured, just slower.

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    Nothing to see here; Move along.
  2. Probable reason for the performance hit by Ryu2 · · Score: 3, Informative
    Besides the lower memory bandwidth and other reasons in the article, it seems to me that the 5200 is implementing the fixed-function T&L pipeline as a vertex shader, to save transistors by foregoing a pure HW implementation, which of course means it'll be slower (although still faster than in software, of course), and of course, you'll incur a greater cost switching between shader and fix-function rendering too. This trick was also used by Trident in their sub-$100 "DX9 compatible" chipsets.


    It's a good measure, but it invaribly means that you'll get lagging performance with these low-end cards, so it's something to be careful of. Maybe in a year or so, once shaders become the norm in games, perhaps Moore's law^3 will have enabled them to put those transistors back on and still hit their price target, but definitely not now.

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    There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
  3. Last generation is better by LittleLebowskiUrbanA · · Score: 4, Informative

    Tom's Hardware is currently recommending the geForce ti4200 for those looking for mid-range card w/ good performance.

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    This guy is way out there
  4. Re:DirectX 9? by Allen+Akin · · Score: 3, Informative

    The OpenGL ARB hasn't approved the 2.0 spec yet, and there are still some pretty fundamental issues to be resolved before then, so there's no way to know whether the 5200 will be able to support it.

  5. Re:Err... by k_187 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Or is the FX the new MX line?

    No, they've dropped the mx moniker and are doing everything by model number like ATI has been. The High end GeForce FX is the FX 5800. There are 5800s, 5600s, and 5200s. 268. Pricewise too.

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    11 was a racehorse
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  6. NVidia's budget cards.... by grolschie · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hey c'mon this is normal. The budget NVidia cards have always supported advanced features, but when you actually use them they run like crap. I still have a Geforce 2 MX200 (a gift from a friend who got duped by a retailer). It supports 4x AA, but when this feature (and others eg: 32bit color on resolutions higher than 400x300) are activated, it craps out.

    The thing overclocks nicely, and when running in "best performance" mode in 16bit, it flies, uh well kinda. The key with all NVidia budget cards is to run 'em without all the technical advanced features. The reviewer enabled all kinds of crap that the card only just supported. Perhaps NVidia would do well to not let their budget cards support these advanced features. Benchies would be higher, and I guess more realistic. Most gamers (or would-be gamers with crappy MX200's like me) try to squeeze as much juice from their cards as they can. ;-)