b1lk1 said:
6200's are terrible as they have ultra slow 64-bit memory. Steer clear and get a 6600 if anything. The 5800ULTRA is a monster of a card, just very hard to find. I believe they use different and much faster memory, but I am honestly not sure. I just know that it was a special card in the 5x00 linup that was basically the best of them all. Why not just get the 6600GT AGP?
I think you are confused, the FX5800Ultra is the laughing stock of plenty of hardware review sites and forums, it was also know as the
"dustbuster" because of its huge and very noisy HSF, and didn't deliver the expected performance, so very few of these cards actually made it to the shelves.
The fastest of the FX series card was the FX5950, which could beat the 9700Pro in most benchmarks, but by the time it was released, Ati already was selling the 9800, and would soon deliver a two hit punch combo by releasing the 9800XT.
Today, the FX series are best remembered by their poor SM2.0 support, as evidenced by games like Half Life 2 (who doesn't remember the Radeon 9600 beating the crap out of then nVidia's flagship FX5950 in HL2 when both cards used SM2.0
![Stick Out Tongue :p :p](https://tpucdn.com/forums/data/assets/smilies/tongue-v1.gif)
), and more recently by newer games like Oblivion, that almost fully dropped the FX series cards from the supported list shortly after release, only barely supporting from the FX5700 onwards, as cards like the FX5200 and 5500 offered dismal framerates when playing Oblivion.
It also wasn't a true 8 pipeline architecture, as nVidia opted by an ill supported "4x2" design, so almost all 8 pipelines Ati cards of the time would beat the FX cards. They are also infamous because of the so called "optimizations" nVidia used in their drivers to deliver higher 3dmark03 scores, by using reduced precision instructions, which in the end produced a lower IQ when compared to the 9x00 cards. The only games in which these cards performed better than the 9x00 series, was in OpenGL based games.
I think it's safe to say that nVidia would prefer to have all references to the FX series buried in the past, as the company had to struggle to keep up with Ati back in the day. In fact, nVidia was out of the 3d high performance game for a while (as shown by the high rate of 9x00 cards sold compared to the FX series), and it was not until the 6 series were released, that nVidia had a real contender to Ati's legendary R3x0 architecture (and afterwards the R4x0 based on this very succesful predecessor)