MSI's Ge-force FX 5800 Ultra will be their flagship card for this spring. As to how it performs, you'll have to wait for the full review. There have been a few Ge-force FX previews up on the net. However, none of the cards tested so far are retail cards. Can NVIDIA's flagship card overcome ATI's 9700 Pro in performance? MSI says it should be about 20% faster than the 9700 Pro. However, there's something else waiting in the wings for ATI. How it'll play out, I don't know. But I'm very excited about the Ge-force FX Ultra.
Let me leave you with a few thoughts. Graphics card technologies move forward at a ever-increasing pace. Who would have thought 5 years ago, that we would see games as beautiful as Unreal 2 or Doom3 or video card hardware that runs faster than the Intel CPUs of that time? I remember a time when I thought the first Master of Orion looked like "the bomb". Today, beautiful graphics are a necessary component of any computer game, as is the hardware that drives it.
Shortly, NVIDIA and ATI will bring this type of technology into the mainstream with cards in every price point (from $99-399). If you're a gamer still using a TNT2 class card still, it'll be a great time to upgrade your video card shortly. As games start to take advantage of the feature set of DirectX 9.0 this year and next, it'll be important to get a video card like the MSI Ge-force FX 5800 Ultra to play them. I won't make any judgment on the Ge-force FX until my review, but thought you'd like a different perspective.
