They've just about always been rare. The 5800 was delayed and the 5900 replaced them rather quickly so there aren't huge numbers of them out there. They were a media spectacle so got burned into the minds of many people. An interesting piece of history.

As to why people pay huge money for any of this stuff? Mysteries of the universe. 😀

Art sells for hundreds of millions and that's not the leftovers of a month's salary to anyone. $1000 well is. Relative to income, I've dropped similar percentages on useless things that I'd taken a transient fancy to.

The FX5800 Ultra was an overpriced piece of shit when it was released, and it's an even less desirable piece of shit today so to answer your question: Beats me.

I guess one man's shit is indeed another's gold.

Agreed, I hate seeing people pay so much for a product that even back in the day wasn't worth it. Originally I stuck with my overclocked Geforce4 Ti 4200, and unless my build had to be period specific for exactly 2003 I certainly would go for either Geforce4 Ti 4600 or a Geforce 6600 GT.

Just watched a FX5950 sell on ebay for $202.50 US. Usually the top of any product seems to go for alot of money even if its not good.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/RARE-ASUS-GeForce-FX … 353.m1438.l2649

I had just snapped up a 2nd Quadro FX 3000 for too much money on ebay. 😒

@ BinaryDemon
The upper (5800/5900) FX cards shouldn't be too bad and should beat a Ti4600 at DX7/8 games while being more compatible with older games than the 6xxx and up might not.

At this day and age the FX or R300 series aren't good choices for DX9 games.

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

At this day and age the FX or R300 series aren't good choices for DX9 games.

At least R300 series cards are fantastic choices for DX8 games, the FX have no saving grace whatsoever.

R300 kind of hold their own in early DX9 titles like HL2, too. Only when you venture into XBOX 360 era they become long in the tooth.

appiah4 wrote:

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

At this day and age the FX or R300 series aren't good choices for DX9 games.

At least R300 series cards are fantastic choices for DX8 games, the FX have no saving grace whatsoever.

R300 kind of hold their own in early DX9 titles like HL2, too. Only when you venture into XBOX 360 era they become long in the tooth.

I'm not bashing either card. I had a Evga FX 5700 Ultra and a P4 3GHz HT back in the day and remember suffering with HL2 (even dropped DX level), and Doom3, Quake 4, NFSU2 etc... For DX9 and that time frame I would slam it with my XP rig that has a GTX285.

Looks like someone else saw the action and put another one up...already >$1000AUD.

I remember even like 8 years ago the 5800 Ultra was fetching decent sums. Definitely new money flowing now though. The 5800's old target audience has some well off members now who need one bad.

Stock up on those 2900 XT cards friends. 🤣

It's not a good card, but it's a fairly notable one, even memorable. It's obviously not worth the money, because it was never worth its price tag. 😀

My 5950 Ultra cost 12 euro boxed and sealed, only three years ago.

5950 Ultra wasn't as rare as 5800 Ultra though. I've had a few 5900s and 5950s over the years for cheap. 5800 Ultra is much less common. I've never come across a cheap one.

There's certainly no practical reason to go 5800 instead of 5900. And of course a 6600 GT completely dusts the entire FX series in every way except the loss of hardware paletted texture support and the requirement of newer drivers that cause trouble with some games.

appiah4 wrote:

At least R300 series cards are fantastic choices for DX8 games, the FX have no saving grace whatsoever.

The saving grace of the FX series may be its drivers. I find Nvidia's drivers are fantastic for retro machines and games.

With ATI, first of all, I don't like having to install .NET for the Catalyst Control Center. I can "solve" this by using slightly older drivers that have the Control Panel instead, no big deal. The real problem for me is that fixed aspect-ratio scaling and centered output without scaling don't work. In my book, these are must have options when using a digital display, centered output without scaling is simply awesome for 4:3 games, and I cannot do it with ATI cards (I'd love to be proven wrong, though! And no, using a CRT is not a "solution" 😒).

The FX line offers sufficient performance and provides the display options I want. Shame, because I'd love to use my 8500 and 9800 way more often than I do.

As for the actual topic of the thread: that's a LOT of money. Collectors will be collectors, its a rare card after all.

appiah4 wrote:

At least R300 series cards are fantastic choices for DX8 games, the FX have no saving grace whatsoever.

Why are so many people so strongly inclined to call something the best/the worst even when there is barely any difference?

Supply and demand, it's that simple. It doesn't matter too much if it sucked or not, it matters how many cards are "in the wild" for sale and how many potential buyers. If there are more buyers than cards and if some of those buyers are willing to pay a high price... it will sell at a high price. At least hardware items will most likely end up in a collection of someone who knowns exactly what they buy. For other items this isn't true a lot of times: watches, paintings, diamonds, etc - the buyer might buy those obly because they are rare and expensive.

appiah4 wrote:

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

At this day and age the FX or R300 series aren't good choices for DX9 games.

At least R300 series cards are fantastic choices for DX8 games, the FX have no saving grace whatsoever.

R300 kind of hold their own in early DX9 titles like HL2, too. Only when you venture into XBOX 360 era they become long in the tooth.

no NV3x was faster than R300 in DX8 and 7 titles, all the benchmarks show this, as well as faster in openGL

candle_86 wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

At this day and age the FX or R300 series aren't good choices for DX9 games.

At least R300 series cards are fantastic choices for DX8 games, the FX have no saving grace whatsoever.

R300 kind of hold their own in early DX9 titles like HL2, too. Only when you venture into XBOX 360 era they become long in the tooth.

no NV3x was faster than R300 in DX8 and 7 titles, all the benchmarks show this, as well as faster in openGL

No. They were NOT. They Really Were NOT. They were a match for the R300 at best case scenarios and got demolished when AA AF came into question.

This whole misconception that NV30 was actually good for anything is really funny, it's a testament to how good nV marketing always was I suppose. The card was a hot pile of stinking shit.

@up That Q3A score... here's one with newer drivers and A LOT beter CPU :
Radeon 9800 XT :

GeForce FX 5950 Ultra (newer, but I did compare it to fastest Radeon 9800 there is) :

FX indeed lost in Doom3 and all 3DMark tests (99-06).
Crysis can't even start on this GPU (it works fine on 9800 XT).

That FX sucks in DX9 games is a pretty well known fact that was made clear in the very first, original reviews when it came out in 2003.

In DX7/8 games it is somewhat different, the difference between it and a 9800 is far less, and it supports older graphics features that the Radeons do not.

If you want AA+AF with paletted textures+fog table support, it's not a bad choice. I run a FX5900XT, which is a lower end 5900 model, but overclocked, and it plays a bunch of DX8 games quite well. No, you don't want to run any DX9 games on it - but I don't bother with 9800s either, I actually run a Radeon HD 5770 which destroys DX9 so badly it's not funny. (and by bad I mean good).

When I think of awful products, I think along the lines of S3 Savage 2000 or Trident 3DImage. GeForce FX doesn't really fit there.

Part of the reason ATI R300 looked awesome for D3D 9 was Shader Model 2 is almost exactly designed for the chip's specs. MS used it as their target for some businessy reason. That was a big win for ATI. All games essentially optimized for ATI. NV3x is nothing like R300 and that's not all bad. It was almost already compliant with Shader Model 3. NV4x was a further development and that certainly turned out well.

Like others have said NV3x has top OpenGL support and it works great with old D3D games. It's not fun to get Bioware OpenGL games working perfectly on a Radeon, or deal with ATI's lack of DVI scaling options on pre-X1000 GPUs, or their disinterest in supporting table fog.

That's not to say R300 et al weren't great choices in their day.