What’s particularly impressive about NV34 is that NVIDIA has squeezed support for all those DirectX 9 features into a die containing only 45 million transistors-nearly one third as many as NV30.īeyond its full DirectX 9 feature support, here’s a quick rundown of NV34’s key features and capabilities. As the graphics chip behind NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 52 Ultra, NV34 has full support for the same DirectX 9 features as even the high-end NV30. NVIDIA’s big push with its GeForce FX line is top-to-bottom support for DirectX 9 features, including pixel and vertex shaders 2.0, floating point data types, and gobs of internal precision. Have NVIDIA and Albatron really produced a sub-$100 graphics product capable of running the jaw-dropping Dawn demo and today’s 3D applications with reasonably good frame rates? How does the card stack up against its budget competition? Let’s find out. Now that I have Albatron’s Gigi FX5200P graphics card in hand, it’s time to take stock of what kind of sacrifices were made to squeeze the “cinematic computing” experience into just 45 million transistors. Or maybe I’m just turning into a grumpy old man. Maybe it was merely the fact that I didn’t believe NVIDIA could pull off a budget graphics chip with a full DirectX 9 feature set without making cutting corners somewhere.

Perhaps I still had a bitter taste in my mouth after the recycled DirectX 7 debacle that was the GeForce4 MX, or maybe it was NVIDIA’s unwillingness to discuss the internal structure of its graphics chips. The chips, which would go on to power NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 56 lines, respectively, promised full DirectX 9 features and compatibility to the masses. W HEN NVIDIA announced its NV31 and NV34 graphics chips, I have to admit I was a skeptic.

Nvidia geforce fx 5200 128mb agp