The 5700 Ultra is based upon Nvidia’s NV36 chip. This chip is an all-new architecture based upon their NV3x chip which was first introduced with the Geforce FX 5800 Ultra last year. This is the third mid-range Geforce FX chip that Nvidia has released this year, after the 5600 Ultra NV31, the flip-chip 5600 Ultra which was clocked at 350 MHz, and now the 5700 Ultra which replaces it.

So what’s new on the 5700 Ultra? The NV36 chip is the first Nvidia chip manufactured at IBM’s Fishkill facility. Based upon .13um process, the 5700 Ultra is designed for ultra high speed clocks. MSI’s card is clocked at 475 MHz for the core clock speed and 450 MHz for the memory clock speed. This card, along with ATI’s 9600XT is the first mainstream video card with a clock speed coming close to 500 MHz.

MSI’s 5700 Ultra supports all of the features of it’s bigger brother, the 5950 Ultra. Fitted with 4 pixel pipelines, the 5700 Ultra has a projected fill rate of 1.9 Gigapixels per second, which matches Nvidia’s specification for this card, and is only slightly lower than the competition’s fillrate of 2 Gigapixels per second.

Memory bandwidth for the 5700 Ultra is 14.4 GB/second. This compares quite favorably with the memory bandwidth of the previous Geforce FX 5600 Ultra and Flip-Chip 5600 Ultra’s bandwidth of 10.4 GB/second. This is almost the same memory bandwidth as found on the 5800 Ultra that was the high-end card just a few months ago from Nvidia.

The pixel and vertex shaders of the 5700 Ultra are much improved over the shaders of the 5600 Ultra. The base feature set is the same as the other Geforce FX cards including 1024 pixel shader instructions in a single pass 65,000+ vertex shader instructions in a pass with loops and subroutines Pixel Shader 2.0, Vertex Shader 2.0 compliance. Nvidia increased the number of vertex shader pipelines on the 5700 Ultra to 3 from 1. This increases the vertex throughput to 356 million theoretically. The 5700 Ultra also supports the UltraShadow technology first introduced with the Geforce FX 5900 Ultra and Intellisample HCT, Nvidia’s name for FSAA.