You know my friends, it was June the 22nd in 2004 when we first took a peek at NVIDIA's young rascal, the GeForce 6800 GT. It offered staggering performance and I was like "wow" the rumors were a hundred percent true. We are now a sturdy year away from that first GT release and a couple of things have changed in that time-frame. Most importantly, we have seen a massive shift from the AGP platform towards PCI-Express. Yes, can you imagine that was just roughly a year ago ?

Secondly, in that timeframe prices have come down. You can now pickup a 6800 GT for roughly 300 USD or 275 EUR these days, which is a good 100 bucks cheaper compared to the launch price. Fact is that this product is still offering brilliant performance for a good price. That price however is still a little too high to be able to compete with for example some of ATI's up and coming X1K products, today specifically the x1600 XT and x800 GTO. Yet also there is a little gap in the market between the standard GeForce 6800 and the GeForce 6800 GT. It seems NVIDIA figured, hey it's almost Chistmas season, let's fill 'er up !

Tagged with a sales price of roughly 250 EUR - 250 USD for the 256 MB models, there is now another product available in that very broad range of Series 6 products from NVIDIA. Today's product is the GeForce 6800 GS, feature wise 100% similar to any GeForce 6800 product yet performance and pricing wise it sits right between the 6800 and 6800 GT.

When you look at it's architecture the GeForce 6800 GS leans more towards the plain 6800 over the 6800 GT though, as the product has a similar amount of pixel-pipelines (12) and also is equipped with 5 vertex processors. Where is that extra performance coming from I hear you ask ? Well there are two explanations for it. Focus on the chart below where I've listed the more relevant specifications.