Albatron GeForceFX 5200P Videocard Review

nVIDIA received a lot of flak when they released the GeForce4 MX GPU last year, many screamed that the GPU while fast, did not deserve the GeForce4 nomenclature since it was not DirectX 8 compatible. It seems like nVIDIA learned from their mistakes this time around because the entire GeForceFX line of GPU's are DirectX 9 compatible - even the budget GeForceFX 5200 based Albatron videocard we're testing today! Based on the NV34 core (and despite the higher core code), the GeForceFX 5200 is slower then the NV30/FX 5800 and NV31/FX5600 cores. With only 47 million transistors, the GeForceFX 5200 core has less then half of the transistors of the flagship GeForceFX 5800 (125 million) and only about a third less then the GeForceFX 5600 (75 million) core. Heck even the GeForce4 Ti's had a transistor count of 63 million. nVIDIA also use the more mature (and less expensive) 0.15 micron manufacturing process for the GeForceFX 5200 class cards instead of 0.13 micron for the FX 5600, FX5800's.