RADEON 9200 vs GEFORCE5200 REVIEW

Four parallel rendering pipelines process up to 1.1 billion pixels per second. High performance 2nd generation hardware transform & lighting engine. Advanced vertex shader support for the latest effects.

Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 8.1 programmable pixel and vertex shaders in hardware. 1.4 Pixel Shaders support up to 22 instructions and up to 6 textures per rendering pass. 1.1 Vertex Shaders support vertex programs up to 128 instructions. Programmable shaders provide enhanced 3D effects in over 100 existing and upcoming game titles. Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL via extensions.

Image quality enhancement features for Direct3D™ and OpenGL ® applications. Programmable full-scene anti-aliasing supports 2 to 6 samples with user selectable performance and quality modes. Advanced anisotropic filtering supports 2 to 16 samples for high quality texture rendering with minimal performance impact.

Lossless Z-Buffer Compression and Fast Z-Buffer Clear reduce memory bandwidth by up to 25%

Hardware accelerated de-blocking of Internet video streams. Delivers industry leading DVD playback. Integrated MPEG-2 decode including iDCT and motion compensation for top quality DVD with lowest CPU usage. Unique adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing feature combines the best elements of the "bob" and "add-field" (weave) techniques. YUV to RGB color space conversion. Back-end scaler delivers top quality playback. 4-tap horizontal and vertical filtering. Upscaling and downscaling. Filtered display of images up to 1920 pixels wide. Hardware mirroring for flipping video images in video conferencing systems. Supports 8-bit alpha blending and video keying for overlay of video and graphics.

CineFX Engine - Powers cinematic effects beyond imagination. With advanced vertex and pixel shader capabilities, stunning and complex special effects are possible. In addition, increased horsepower delivers faster and smoother gameplay.

High-Precision Graphics - By combining the incredible dynamic range of today's state-of-the-art 3D motion pictures with 128-bit studio-precision colour, the GeForce GPUs bring you the industry’s best image quality for the most demanding applications.

AGP 8X - Provides double the bandwidth of AGP 4X—2.1GB/sec. vs. 1.1BG/sec. AGP 8X enables more complex models and detailed textures, creating richer and more lifelike environments. Uninterrupted data flow allows for smoother video streaming and faster, more seamless gameplay.

nView Multi-display Technology - The nView hardware and software technology combination delivers maximum flexibility for multi-display options, and provides unprecedented end-user control of the desktop experience.

Digital Vibrance Control (DVC) - Allows the user to adjust colour controls digitally to compensate for the lighting conditions of their workspace, in order to achieve accurate, bright colours in all conditions. Currently this feature is not available on Mac systems.

Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Optimizations and Support - Ensures the best performance and application compatibility for all DirectX 9 applications.

OpenGL® 1.4 Optimizations and Support - Ensures the best performance and application compatibility for all OpenGL applications.

Integrated TV Encoder - Provides best-of-class TV-out functionality for resolutions up to 1024x768.

Integrated Full Hardware MPEG-2 Decoder - Delivers full-frame, full-screen MPEG-2 video on your desktop.

New 64-phase Video Scaler - Highest quality for scaling DVD and other video to full-screen HDTV resolutions.

DVI Support - Able to drive the industry's largest and highest resolution flat-panel displays with up to 1600x1200 resolution.

350MHz RAMDACs - Supports QXGA displays with ergonomic refresh rates.

Architected for Cg - Ensures that the newest, cutting-edge special effects in applications will run flawlessly. Speeds up content creation so game developers can get their new games out to PC users faster than ever before.

Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) - Guarantees forward and backward compatibility with software drivers. Simplifies upgrading to a new NVIDIA product because all NVIDIA products work with the same driver software.