Can you remember the first time you fired up Quake on your brand spanking new 3Dfx Voodoo 3D accelerator back in 1996? I know I do; it was like an entirely new game. All of the sudden you had lighting effects as grenades bounced down the hallway (not to mention their explosions), more realistic looking textures, and just an entire new feeling of creepiness. Thus was born a new era in gaming graphics, the 3D accelerators.

It didn't take too long before competition came knocking at 3Dfx's door with new product offerings from ATI and NVIDIA. NVIDIA gained quick ground with such chips as the TNT and TNT2, winning over some of 3Dfx's customer base which, as we know, eventually leading to their closing in 2000. NVIDIA held a commanding lead for quite some time with their various GeForce series of chips. Unfortunately, a lot of that changed when ATI took a more aggressive stance and introduced the Radeon branded line of cards. No longer could NVIDIA's years of dominance be supported purely on their name in the marketplace, they were now having to compete head to head with ATI on all fronts; performance, features, and namely, price. Add to that the delay of the GeForce FX based products to the market due to the 0.13 micron manufacturing process changeover, the bad press surrounding the 3DMark03 driver “optimizations”, and several big name manufacturers switching their primary product line to ATI branded cards, and things definitely begin to look grim.

Fast forward to a new year. NVIDIA looks as though they've gotten back on the horse and have begun to introduce a series of cards that show they're definitely not out of this race yet. One such recent introduction is the 5900XT GPU, which is the particular model that we'll be looking at today. More specifically, we'll be looking at MSI's ( Micro Star International ) version of the card, the FX5900XT VTD128. MSI is probably most noted for their motherboard related products (they're currently one of the top three manufacturers), but has also built a solid reputation around their NVIDIA branded line of video cards over the past few years as well. Shipping over 5 million units in 2001 alone, it's easy to see why MSI is currently the #1 NVIDIA Card Partner worldwide.

Considering the 5900XT series is priced in the same range as its 5700Ultra brethren, it'll be interesting to see how well it stacks up. We'll bench it not only against a 5700Ultra, but also against the other market favored cost versus performance card, the ATI 9600XT. Will ATI retain their crown in this mid-market product field or does NVIDIA have a new champion in their corner? Read on to find out.