Pushin' pixels
Let's have a look at how the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra stacks up against the present and past competition in the high end of the market. These cards cost five hundred bucks for a reason, and that's because they are supposed to offer better performance in new games, at high resolutions, with all the eye candy turned up. Such speed costs money—money for the best chips, money for the fastest RAM. These cards are all about pixel-pushing power, so memory bandwidth and fill rate are two of the key performance factors. The table below will show us the lay of the land, at least in theoretical terms.

As you can see, the 5950 Ultra trails behind the 8-pipe Radeon chips in peak fill rate when only one texture is applied per pixel, but with multiple textures per pixel, the situation is rather dramatically reversed. Since games tend to use a mix of single and multitexturing, neither the GeForce nor the Radeon has a clear advantage here.

We can test our theoretical numbers by running some simple fill rate tests on the cards.

The results of our synthetic tests track pretty closely with our theory, at least in terms of relative performance. The 5950 Ultra leads the pack in multitexturing, while the 9800 XT leads in single texturing.

Of course, fill rate isn't the only gating factor for performance in modern graphics cards. Newer games and apps use programmable pixel and vertex shaders to achieve advanced visual effects, and proficiency at simple pixel filling won't suffice in such cases.