The GeForce FX Series - NVIDIA's Huge Misstep
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- čas přidán 7. 09. 2024
- The notorious GeForce FX series lives up to its reputation. But why? In this documentary-style video we take a look back at what made the FX series one of NVIDIA's worst generations of cards.
Intro Animation By Ken Gruca Jr - Inquire at kjgruca@gmail.com!
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I remember that card, the rich kid at school had the GeForce 5800 Ultra and kept bragging about it and how great and expensive it was... lol That same year, I got some money for Christmas, and with the money I already had, I purchased a 9800 Pro. When Half-Life 2 came out about 1 year later, the 9800 Pro was literally destroying the FX 5800 Ultra and I had my own personal revenge: That rich kid admitted it was running better on my computer than his :P
The 9800 pro is still 50% faster
after the 9800 i ran a X850 GTO. Than the rich kid in my school decided pown me with a X1800 XT with a big Zalmancooler. That was the time i give up because i was the poor kid :D
@@ferox1183 hell i just bought a gtx 970 from money i scrounged together from my job lol
I can't imagine a HS kid buying a flagship gpu with Xmas money today.
Childhood Revenge 😉
The FX name is just as damaging to the brand for Geforce as AMD's processors almost a decade later.
triadwarfare cursed name indeed.
But what was wrong with amd processors? (I'm still using athlon 2 x2 270, so I know nothing about fx)
@@TohaZhirnij Ever heard of AMD Phenom or FX -house heaters- processors?
@@TohaZhirnij The FX series used to be AMD top of the line series, I think what he meant was the FX series from Phenom-Bulldozer series which was loud, hot and perform worse than even an i3. The old Athlon64 FX series was amazing though, but very expensive
what about the 3DFX brand?
"Just 4 pixel pipes"
*crowd cheers* he said it! he said the name of the show!
CATCHPHRASE
I can only imagin this quote in Peter Griffien's voice.
Roll credits!
I CLAPPED , I Clapped when he said it !
Roll credits! ~ding~
Fun fact: Microsoft was fed up with Nvidia because they never gave them discounts for the GF3 chips for the Xbox so they invited ATI to work with them on DX9 instead while giving Nvidia the specs for DX9 very late (maybe even the wrong ones via 16 bit). So basically the fail of FX is caused by Nvidias greediness regarding the Xbox GPU
Nvidia got too big for their britches. Thought they could bully developers, and gaslight home consumers.
ATI practically saved the home desktop industry by exposing Nividia's growing cancer, and we're all better off for it now, including Nvidia itself.
discount for Microsoft ?
@@tunkunrunk Discount for buying in bulk.
And thats the stupid reason that the Geforce4 dont support DX9 but the DX9 was developed on the original xbox geforce4 prototype and the Xbox can handle DX9 effects but the Geforce4 not, and ATI got DX9 6 months earlier than Nvidia. So you can play Far-Cry, Half-Life2 or Doom3 on the original xbox with dynamic lighting, transparen shaders and water reflections... but not on a Geforce4 lol because its capped to dx8.
@@SargentoDuke that direct x shit , anyone who started playing pc game in the late 90s and early 2000s couldn't have missed that direct x thing . it was required for multimedia too , remember " couldn't find direct sound dll etc.. oh my gosh ! that was the good old days
Great video! I still remember being rewarded for my good grades in 8th grade with a visit to the computer store with my dad to buy me a graphics card. It was a... Geforce FX 5200 :/
And this was in 2006.
Awww... That's sad and sweet at the same time!
Well it was serviceable for sure, and thanks to it I could experience a lot of games that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to play at that time, til I got a more up to date PC by late 2011. My country and especially the part where I lived was really behind in terms of technology, everything got there late and at ridiculous prices. Now it's a lot better, thankfully.
Just bought that fx5200 for 5 euro
@@Roshan_420 Still expensive . Geforce 4 mx did better in games ( basicilly a gefore 2 card ).
@@Roshan_420 If you are unlucky with the card it might need a later OS and the performance so bad you cant play the old games. Games before 2004 even ut2003 i pretty much to much for the card.
I had one of the Radeon 9500 cards that could be soft-modded to a 9700 Pro. One of the best GPUs I ever owned.
Nvidia did everything wrong with NV30 that could have been done:
1. New architecture on a new manufacturing process, usually resulting in sub-optimal TDP.
2. Narrow pipeline at high clock speeds, with strict vector format packing.
3. Over-engineered features, well outside of the contemporary API scope, at expense of the raw throughput.
In other words, that generation was the "Pentium 4" of the GPUs.
NV35 (FX5900 Series) fared rather well, to be honest -- lots of sales and the saving grace, until NV40 was ready.
By the way, the record short R&D time for NV40 was due to the fact that most of the work was already done with the NV3x series and the only effort left was to beef up the performance per clock and smooth the SM3.0 validation.
By that time (2004), the work on the future G80 and CUDA compute frame-work was gearing up for a big surprise.
Yeah very true.
Ah yeah the times. My favorite budget “gaming” pc back then was Pentium 4 3GHz Prescott + FX5200. Ah you just cant beat this combination. Even better yet when it’s FX5200 256MB 64bit - what were they thinking :D
I gotta say, I had a BFG nVidia geforce 5600 ultra and i used it until about 2010 or 2011, and it did me well, never had a framerate issue with that card. DooM 3 ran great. But i couldn't play COD4 on it :( darn pixel/vertex shader 3.0 rquirement
I love the 90's documentary style.
lol! Now I understand why, back in the day, people used to say that ATI 9000 series had better image quality than nVidia FX series.
My first PC gaming experience came from a Dell Inspiron 4600 that came with a 5200. I was pretty young at the time and only really knew that it had a graphics card and that meant I could play games! I suffered my way through Half Life 2 and Doom 3 with hardly playable performance. When I finally upgraded to a BFG 6800 OC I played Half Life 2 again and it was like a brand new game!
do you remember what FPS you were getting on the 5200 compared to the 6800?
Remember my upgrade from Geforce 4 MX to new platform on 8800GT, that was a mindblow
As weak as it is the GeForce fx series is the oldest GPU series capable of running on windows 10 with wddm drivers.
I had one of these up until 2010. It was an outdated GPU the day it came out.
loved that intro man!
Hahahhhahhhahahhahahhhha
The intro!
*LMFAO*
Yeah, yeah, sure, but that nude Dawn demo surely made up for it. I was a young man, dammit!
so forgot bout that lol
It ran at 18fps on my FX 5200
Haha came here to say the same thing. I still have that demo somewhere in my archives ... DAWN FTW!
6:52 Lowspecgamer was impressed on how the FX5200 ran on Far Cry despite being poor on everything else. He thinks it was due to optimization. Now we know the reason why
When you have something like FX5200, you really dont care about quality. It was my first card and I remember it as relatively capable card, able to run many games. Sadly most of cards had only 64kb memory interface, that was main reason why it was so slow... Best feature was BIOS edit to make it report as 8800 Ultra on boot and in system. Many friends was jealous about my poor little 5200....128MB.....with that fkin 64kb interface...no i dont miss that thing, HELL NO! Those memories i just got ...
I was gaming more on my PS2 and Dreamcast to care about how good shaders looks because games were dominating in console platform. The only game I was happy that I was running Giants: citizen Kabuto and that was ported to consoles later on.
@Drumslav Czechisenko Well, that is little other price range back then
Martin Coufalík I had the 128MB FX5200 in my first PC as well. Didn’t stop me from playing GTA San Andreas for hundreds of hours when that came out.
I think this video is a huge step up in quality, really well realised ! I'm really impressed, you've worked hard on it, it's obvious. Everybody in the comment section should respect that ! Keep up the great work dude ;)
Greetings from France
What's funny is that the word "FX" was cursed even for Kawasaki when making large ZTR motors (commerical lawn mowers). The FX engines overheated and or blew head gaskets quickly.
I had the FX5200 Ultra and later upgraded to the FX 5700 Ultra. The 'Dawn' nude patch...Good times. My 5700 Ultra (can't remember the brand, maybe PNY) had about 20 dollars worth of copper pennies as the heatsinks (top and bottom)! Up next for me was the 6600GT, a true beast for its time, and the FX series redeemer.
I still have my geforce 6600GT , but do no have agp motherboard
Finally got a chance to watch this. WOW 😮 such a great job. Seriously, I could watch these all day.
Thank you for the footage!
You've got something brown on your nose.
You had mad communication skills as a commentator, well done... Too many folks rush their pitch and step over facts that you cover with clarity... Keep up the great work...
I remember trying to play doom 3 on a 5950 ultra turning up the detail to ultra and literally being disappointed at the frame rate. I still have the 5950 ultra, staring at me in an old AMD 3200 Clawhammer build next to me on my basement floor
Everybody likes to think Nvidia always held the GPU crown.
Let's not forget how Nvidia had been struggling against Radeon for the majority of the company's existence, as well as releasing duds like the FX series.
In the early 2000's AMD had been really good in gaming and most of the time beat Nvidia up until the GeForce 7 series came out. But then and there like 2012 with the radeon hd 79xx cards and in 2020 with the Rx 6000 gpu's have been able to overtake Nvidia.
Ahhh the vacuum cleaner card. I remember that. I passed. I stayed with my GeForce 4 4200ti.
It's meme name was the Nvidia Leafblower. There's even an old photoshop image for it.
I owned a 5700 Ultra back in 2003, I got it for $155 at Best Buy due to a pricing error on their part. For the price I couldn't complain about the performance, it ran Doom 3 at medium settings at 1024x768 and Half Life 2 at high settings at 1024x768 in DirectX 8.1 (Had to get the Radeon 9800 XT for DirectX 9 to truly appreciate Half Life 2).
The best lesson from this video is, NOBODY, should ever name a product "FX" EVER AGAIN. It never turns out good.
Ahhh... That one time Nvidia was obviously going out of their way to avoid naming a product the GeForce 5 6000 so as not to summon the 3dfx curse.
LOL well the curse was confined to this series least.
Ahh 3dfx remebr them days, i had 3 black magic voodoo 2's. I feel that was the birth of sli. Then nvidia bought them and shelved 3dfxs ability to run more then 1 you for some years. I think I still have what was the name. Voodoo 5500agp ( think that's the name ) got the mouse pad that game with that card.
It used to be all about the pipes! I remember getting my X800XT after having a 9800Pro for so long, and it felt magical having 16 whole pipes! My mouth was hanging open the whole time 3dmark was running lol. NV's cards at the beginning of the DX9 era were... unfortunate, until the 6 and 7 series somewhat redeemed them and then the 8 series cemented the fact that they were going to be running this joint for a long time to come.
Really nice video! My first real graphics card when I got into PC gaming properly was a 6800 GT, so I missed out on all the FX series drama. Interesting to see some of the reasons behind it all!
This video is quite surprising to me. Back in 2003 my father bought us new PC as Christmas gift. He bought whole set in computer store, and it was pretty expensive PC at the time. I remember it had Pentium 4 and GeForce FX5900 card. Me and my brother were in ave, because our previous PC was already couple years old and barely ran games. This new PC was really fast and could run every game at the time. I remember playing NFS Underground, Doom 3, Far Cry, TES Morrowind, GTA Vice CIty, San Andreas, Half Life 2, Colin McRae Rally 4 and other titles. These games ran pretty fast, and i never thought something was wrong with video card. Maybe because our CRT wasn't exactly high-resolution? From what i can remember, we used this FX card until 2006, when our nephew sold us 6600GT in order to play Oblivion, because it was struggling on FX5900.
I didn't realised problems with FX series until i came across this video. It was fun to watch, and now i think how gaming would been like if i had ATI card back in the days. Cheers!
I still remember the FX5200 I had once, it shorted out and almost caught fire. It also broke my motherboards AGP port and left me with a broken computer and I had to buy a new cpu, ram. Gpu and motherboard.
Had an FX 5500, a reference one from Nvidia. The card ran so hot and had such a wimpy cooler that the fan failed in just under 2 years of use.
The FX seemed to have some very close design elements to the GF4 and even had a nearly identical pipeline length. Rumor has it the first actual design that was developed from 3DFX technology was the gForce 6 series in a project on the old companies roadmap only known as "Fear". 2 full generations after Napalm. Much of the underlying theoretical work for the upcoming design had been worked out. And its basic pipeline layouts were also already put to paper by its designers not more than weeks before 3dfx's demise. Ex 3dfx designers have talked about this, and talk about how those building blocks were the very foundation of the gForce 6 and 7 series, and were greatly expanded for the Tesla, Tesla2 and Fermi architectures. Only at Kepler did they adopt a new foundational philosophy to the core design. It certainly had some longevity and would 3dfx survived, it would have had something for the next decade.
yes it is.
And Geforce 6 pixel standard redesign also done by Emmett Kilgariff team (He is
Vice President, Architecture in 3DFX and Join Nvidia after they got acquired in 2000. Currently he also
Vice President of GPU Architecture in Nvidia.)
you conquered a new subscriber with just the first minute of video, that's classy
some serious production value on this video man. you just earned a new subscriber
My first graphics card was a Geforce FX5500 which I picked up circa 2005. I wanted World of Warcraft to run better, and it was cheap. The memories lol
For Oblivion, I had to use Oldblivion to disable all lighting effects, shadows and reduce shaders. Even then I only got around 30fps.
I had a 256mb fx5500 and thought it was an amazing card till my friend showed me his 128mb 9600 pro. I thought he was crazy and there was no way a card with half the memory could be better. That was the day I discovered the amount of video memory didn't mean jack. I ended up going to a 6600gt and was very happy.
Ahh the dustbuster FX series! I was on the red side of the fence in those days. I had a ATI 9500 Pro that I kept for way too long back then (ATI 8500 before that and a Radeon DDR before that!) I didn't jump onto the green side until the 750 Ti was released!
Pretty much everyone not a fanboy and who knew a thing or two about hardware were on the red team back then. The 9800 pro could be flashed as a 9800 XT after replacing the stock cooler for a mere 30$. I've been on green team for a while (until i recently bought a 5700 XT because of how expensive RTX is) but the 9800 pro flashed to a 9800 XT remains one of the best card i ever owned.
what an awesome video! I'm totally gonna binge this channel this weekend
NVIDIA FX serie from 5700 and up wasn't too bad. But agree, 5200-5500 cards were very-very slow.
These video cards are great for retro gaming: good compatibility and performance in DOS games, good performance in old Windows games with high quality settings, very compatible 4X.XX-5X.XX Windows 9X drivers aviable, it is the last generation of video cards with "8-bit paletted textures" feature supported, also "table fog" feature is natively supported. And also these cards are the best in Voodoo Glide API wrapping, maybe because they were developed by ex-3DFX developers.
I used to have FX 5200 and 5500 back in the day, and play HL2 in very degraded quality (rendered in DX8.0 instead of DX9.0). I used to envy my friend that uses Radeon 9700, rendered in DX9.0.
Because the image quality difference is like day and night.
I had a bunch of friends who were extremely jealous that I had a Radeon 9700 Pro 128mb at the time of release. It's honestly probably one of the most important graphics cards of our time.
This channel is so underrated. this was my 1st video and instant subscribe. keep up the great work. you will success
was it really called GeForce FX because people from 3dfx made it??? why didn't they just call it GeForce 5?
RIP 3dfx, will never forget the first time I played Quake on a Voodoo, seeing the difference between software mode and a graphics accelerator was the most amazing experience ever. Gaming changed for me after that revelation.
Nobody:
Nvidia in 2002: _let's put a hair-dryer inside people's computers lol_
Awesome video! The FX Series of cards is where I made my jump from an nVidia FX5600 to a Radeon X800Pro...this is on point!
I have to say I distrusted nvidia back then and for a long time forward, but after the HD2900XT debacle I came back and now I'm running a FX-5950 Ultra as my daily driver retro card, it really is not nearly as bad as it was made out to be back then if you look at game performance in actual games of the era. I have a 9800XT gathering dust in my collection because the FX is more consistent and compatible with the older games I play, and it's quieter in my case, I have the MSI dual fan one and it stays cool and makes almost no noice at all.
I loved my 5700 Ultra which was a huge upgrade from my 4200 Ti which came after my gf2 gts. later I had a 6600GT. last AGP card was 7800GS then the regretful 8600GT. I loved my 250 GTS though. then gtx 460 to 670 to my current 970 which I dont plan to upgrade anytime soon.
also had rvia tnt and diamond vipers before that btw. good old days.
ATi was my favorite company before AMD bought it and ruined it. I'm still rocking with my vmodded ATi HD4670. I can play AAA games like The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion/Skyrim, The Witcher 2, Dragon Age 1/2/3 and Fallout 3/NV/TTW. Too bad I can't play Fallout 4 or The Witcher 3, because my GPU doesn't support DX11, but I can watch ''Let's play'' videos and it's almost like playing the game. I have my studio tour and gaming setup video on my channel.
I wouldn't exactly call the RX 580 a mistake.
AMD owned ATi before the HD 2000 series launched bud. Your "favorite" GPU is an AMD card. The last full ATi series was the x100 series.
Also, 5870? 6950? 7970 GHz edition? 290x? 480? AMD has made a lot of great GPUs, their problem lately has always been timing or drivers.
Fun fact: Makita seems to use the same fan in their 18V rapid chargers. For a workshop environment, the noise doesn't really matter though.
Man its the best intro ever!Also,totally my opinion also on the topic.Thanks!
The FX5900 was a good card for its time. It was a decent upgrade over my GeForce 4 Ti 4600 and the feature set was great. Hell, I still play mostly DX9 games today in 2018. (Guild Wars 2)
FX5900, 4 Ti 4600. Worst cards in history. Just overpriced shit
WOW! AGP! I still have a GTX 7800 from BFG Tech. (That still works, but I don't have an AGP board. I was thinking of sending it to Buildzoid to do a breakdown.) I remember getting some of the first Voodoo cards, and MX 200/400. You were the king if you had one of those at the time. Just PCI cards with 16-32 MB. (Not PCI-E). It's kind of like looking at the old high school year book, and laughing at the bad hair styles and fashion! LOL! Great video, by the way! You just earned a subscriber.
I remember being stung by that FX5200, and yes, Halo was the big annoyance for me too with it's lack of proper light refraction stealth camo effects.
Truly professional video! One question i do have though is did you get to fix the 5800 ultra in time for this vid.
No it's still poopy.
I heard this once.
When you're on top, you can do no wrong, but when you lose that position. You can do no right.
I quit pc gaming for 1 year in 2003. Came back in mid 2004. Bought a new pc and got the fx 5200. Had no clue how bad it was till i got a 6600gt and got 6x the proformence over the 5200
That intro is hilarious.
And i have pretty high standards for something to be hilarious.
I got the ATi 9700 Pro when it released and it was an excellent graphics which only got better with later driver releases. It was still a competitive card for a few generations, even for a budget rig at the time it was more than capable of handling the new games being released.
I was one of the victims. Unfortunately had bought FX5500. Then 6800Gs was good though, then 8800GS heating problem, then 9800GT underperfming was my last nVidia Chip.
Long live the new King AMD!
This baffles me a lot. To me (East European boy around 15), the FX5200 was the dream card one guy had in our class, while the rest of us was stuck on black and white 486. I was one of the more fortunate and manage to buy used PC from bankrupt internet cafe that had MX440. Years later I learn I worshiped false god.
As an owner of a RTX 4070 Ti, I can understand the stigma cause by Nvidia's naming missteps, however, I'm still more than happy with it.
I bought an XFX GeForce FX 5200 256MB PCI card for $150 to upgrade a budget HP desktop with integrated graphics just so I could play Sims 2. Also upped from 256MB to 1GB of RAM. I was in middle school and was just learning about PC hardware. It played Sims 2, UT2k4, and EVE Online all at good quality settings without issue, and I never knew I had bought into such an inferior card until years later. Then again, options were limited in the early 2000's on a motherboard that only had standard PCI slots and no AGP or PCI-E.
One of the rumor back then,the Geforce FX is more like a comeback story of 3DFX.( Some products of 3DFX live inside NV3Xand NV4X codename Sage live in NV30 family.
The real fight back of Geforce 6 NV40(leading design and architecture is done by Emmett Kilgariff former
Vice President of Architecture in 3DFX.)
A nice video, had a ati 9550 64 mb at the time this series was new on the market in a pentium III at 1 ghz, mostly playing older direct x games at a max of 1280x1024 which was the crt's highest resolution that me & my brother shared on that pc.
Love the intro btw
Not gonna lie. It was around this era that I was debating a GPU upgrade, and for the money, I was basically between a 9800 Pro or a standard 5950, with a mindset of how well either could be (soft/BIOS)modded to run as their respective next step up. While I lusted for how beautiful the MSI FX 5950 was aesthetically, I just couldn't find it affordably anywhere. And I ended up going with a built-by-ATI 9800 Pro. That initial one had Samsung RAM, and funny enough with the modded BIOS, even when downclocked back to stock Pro speeds, was able to still perform better than it initially did. Irony as it was though, Doom 3 killed that particular card. And it would lead me to the best part of three years of RMA and driver hell with the Radeon team, that I hadn't forgotten, or really fully forgiven, since. Five (yes, five) replacements later and not one of them performed even as well as the original one did, and all traded one set of issues for another. And not one after that samsung-equipped 9800 Pro ever ran KOTOR without crashing. The final nail ended up being upgraded to an X1600 Pro that finally performed right, but flat out died just as soon as the "refurb" warranty ended. Not even joking.
Only much more recently did I end up actually trying a relatively modern Radeon with an RMA that granted me a 7770... On a newer OS, the drivers are admittedly very nice, though for OBS encoding, I'm disappointed that there seems to be no low-latency options with the AMD "VCE" mode compared to nvidia's Shadowplay functionality. On Windows XP? Yeah, Radeon drivers have always been terrible. That said, I'd give an RX Vega a shot, if I had a use case for one... unfortunately, for my present needs (as I write this), I may actually need something at the level of a 2080 Ti. And that one's getting its own set of (deserved) flak.
The FX5200 (PCI version) was the first GPU i ever bought brand new.... I remember it well because it was DOA and I had to return it for a refund
you got my like just for the awesome intro sound mixing
That intro was fantastic! LMAO!
Please do more content like this, it was fantastic!!! This is the kind of obscure stuff you never get to learn about
i've always been told that radeons have better colors but never knew why and didn't really believe in it.
so this is why...
Thanks man. Nice preparation for some of the stuff I'm planning.
2:00 Actually, from what i know, doom 3 is a reboot rather than a sequel, as its history isnt anyhow related to the original doom saga (1, 2 and 64), and even is from a slitly different genre, its still a first person shooter, but now with some horror mixed in (even tho for many it isnt a scary game at all).
The NV engineers delved too greedily and too deep into the 3dfx forbidden knowledge. You know what they awoke in the darkness
Was it Timbury? They awoke Timbury didn't they
You're in my suggestions being on low views and subs and I'm really satisfied with your storytelling. Congratulations!
My FX 5700 wasn't too bad from what I remember. It ran Doom 3, Far Cry and Half-Life 2 absolutely fine.
You forgot to mention the absurde noise in the FX5800 series
"we take a look back at what made the FX series one of NVIDIA's worst generations of cards"
I didn't know I was playing on the worst GPU when I was kid :-D
What the hell was that intro🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
It sacred me a bit, I was sleepy🤣🤣
Just 4 pixel pipes and the little amount of registers and cache that made the GPU to juggle too much stuff around, making it to underperform, it was doomed to fail lol
it was really strange. I remember people hating NVidia at that time for having bought 3dfx. For some people 3dfx was like a god. There were rumors that they used the FX name to honor 3dfx to convince those people from their products. It was so odd that of all things this series sucked badly. Geforce 1, 2, 3 and 4 were all great. They all dominated the market. And then there comes the FX and suddenly it´s all garbage.
Especially considering the strangely wrong steps nvidia made with the architecture, it really reminded on what 3dfx did since the Voodoo 3 until finally they went bankrupt. It really had a smell of a curse. As if there was a curse of this FX name.
To some people, 3Dfx are _still_ gods.
@@PixelPipes I'll die on my VooDoo2 SLI hill
Probably already mentioned but that image is of an x800 ati card not a 9800xt.
Ohh memories !!! I had a budget GeforceFX 5900XT . It wasn't that bad , it had a solid perfomance .
Let's not forget the MX series continued for years! Let's also not forget the naming scam. I had a GF 4 MX which was inferior to my GF 256!
I don't remember where I read this, but I'm wondering if this is a true story as it relates to the FX debacle:
As we all know, NVidia won a huge contract to supply chipsets for the XBox. There was much happiness. NVidia supplied not only the GPU but also sound and probably other chipset logic functions. This led to NVidia's later introduction of the NForce chipsets for PC motherboards.
Later, when the XBox GPU had aged a bit, Microsoft decided they should get a lower price. NVidia refused, citing the contract that had been agreed to by both sides.
In response, Microsoft locked NVidia out of the planning for DirectX 9. ATI was included. So when DirectX 9 was introduced, ATI was ready with a line of GPUs that had been optimized for it.
NVidia could only guess what capabilities would be required by the new API. They guessed wrong. Essentially, the FX series GPUs are not designed for DirectX 9. They're beefed up DirectX 8 GPUs that rely heavily on the driver software to shoehorn DirectX 9 compatibility into them. This in turn necessitated a lot of brute force to make them perform in that situation, hence the unprecedented size and noise of the coolers.
Is the Microsoft vs NVidia story accurate? I never see it discussed anymore, but I remember reading it somewhere. It seems to be the root of the whole fiasco.
Back at that time when I first built my computer with my mother's money. The market in my country was hyped all around Pentium4 & Geforce FX. I ended up with Prescott & FX6200. Many years later when I grow up, I realized that's a wrong decision. I could saving money with Athlon 64 & Radeon 9000s for better performance, cooling, and new technology (64-bit). 15 years later, I built my 3rd rig with all reds (Ryzen5 3600 & RX5700XT).
I'm like 3 seconds into the video and i want to say;thank you.
At least they learned with it and released the excellent Curie architecture with the GeForce 6000 and later 7000 series putting them back in a good position which led them to the legendary Tesla architecture and the development of the CUDA technology with the 8000, 9000, 100, 200 and 300 series.... then again they are committing some serious mistakes again...
an FX 5500 was my very first jump into the computer hardware world. got it when I was 13 years old from ebay in 2008, when my family computer couldn't handle the new Runescape HD texture update. I loved the HELL outta that thing lol
My GeForce FX5200 128mb felt like an awesome buy back in 2003 as my dad bought it for me specifically to run NFS Underground 1 at the time the game ran awesome! but then I learned the truth about how poorly the card would perform a year later when NFS Underground 2. It really felt like I was defeated that day. Thanks for the review it was a nice trip down memory lane.
Very informational, nice job!
Thank you!
I have the FX5700 AGP, I use it in a Windows 98 gaming computer, it supports DirectX 9.0a, that along with the Nvidia driver v56.64, and nGlide v1.05 allows me to run all my 62 Windows 95 & 98 games I have for that machine.
Ahh... those old good days. I loved my FX 5900 XT, little hard voltmod and it was able to operate 550Mhz on gpu and 816Mhz on VRAM (stock was 390/700).
Ahhh the good old days of hairdryers and cheating in benchmarks.
At the time I had a gf2 pro, then a gf3 ti 200, then a gf4 ti 4200se ( volt modded and super clocked)
Then I had some FX cards and man what a waste of money that was. I even skipt the 6000 series cuz of the 5000's. I kept my gf4 ti till a 7600gs then went a gts 250, 285 (kept till gtx 770)
Now on a gtx 970 and 1060 6 gb.
I was in the same boat: gf2 gts, gf3, gf4 4200. When FX came out I remember thinking "wtf is wrong with Nvidia...man I want that 9700 pro".
I sometimes wonder what would have happened to ATI if they never got bought by AMD....but with how often engineers get poached in the industry there's no telling how good or bad ATI might be these days
I got an FX 5200 and wish I'd not fallen for its 128MB memory. From memory, the integrated MX on the Athlon 2200+ mobo was not too dar behind.
Best introduction ever
Nah, 'mistrust' generated by the GeForce FX ended the moment 8800 happened, it took ATi (now AMD) many years to catch up, only to fall back again and again, which basically obliterated their market share that they weren't able to reclaim almost 20 years since.
Irony is that 32 bit float color depth is still seldom used, it's an overkill for most use cases, even HDR pipelines nowadays still use 10-16 bits for actual color.