Right, after a year full of surprises, mistakes and basically one of the worse years of NVIDIA we finally are at the point where NVIDIA gives birth to its new silicon. The name ladies and gentlemen is twofold...the new product is called the GeForce 6 series of GPU's (Graphic's Processor Unit) and the new products are called GeForce 6800 (no more FX) with the newest flagship named the 6800 Ultra. That's right; GeForce 6800, not GeForceFX 6800.
You know, I've been in contact with NVIDIA several times ever since the CeBIT, and they are confident about this product; confident that it will bring awesome Image Quality, an excellent feature-set and the raw horsepower you expect for your money. Guru3D.com brings you the scoop, let's get started.
In this article we'll use the GeForce 6 Series phrase a lot, which refers to the NV40 silicon. Okay, let me throw some keywords at you after we will go a little more in-depth into Series 6. Let's kill off some rumors people!:
- This a 16 pipeline GPU architecture (12 on 6800 non Ultra).
- Up-to 8x more shading performance compared to the previous generation
- CineFX 3.0 engine - Yes indeed...DirectX Shaders model 3.0 for really nice visual effects
- On Chip Video processor.
- DDR3 memory on a 256-bit Memory interface
- UltraShadow II technology - Doom III; need I say more ? Very well then...3x to 4x faster than NV35 !
- High Precision Dynamic Range (HPDR) technology - we'll discuss this later in the article
- 128-studio precision through the entire pipeline - 32-bit Color precision; this time with nice performance.
- IntelliSample 3.0 Technology - 16x Anisotropic Filtering & Rotating Grid Anti Aliasing
- Full MPEG encoding and decoding at GPU level !
- Advanced Adaptive De-Interlacing
- Video Scaling and Filtering - HQ filtering techniques including HDTV resolutions
- Integrated TV Encoder - TV-output up-to 1028x768 resolutions
- OpenGL 1.5 Optimizations and support
- DVC 3.0 (Digital Vibrance Control)
- Dual 400 MHz RAMDACs which support QXGA displays up-to 2048x1536 @ 85 Hz
- Dual DVI
Since there will be two 6800 models let's have a look at them in a little table, all details as clockspeeds and prices are not yet 100% confirmed:
But the thing you need to remember is that the 6800 will have 12 pixel pipelines and 128 MB DDR memory and the 6800 Ultra is the beast with 256 MB DDR3 memory and 16 pixel pipelines.
| Specs |
GeForce 6800 |
GeForce 6800 Ultra |
| Codename |
NV40 |
NV40U |
| Transistors |
222 million |
| Process, GPU maker |
130nm, IBM |
| Core clock |
Up to 400 MHz |
400-450 MHz |
| Memory |
128MB DDR1 |
256MB GDDR3 |
| Memory bus |
256-bit |
| Memory clock |
2 x 550MHz |
2 x 600MHz |
| PCB |
P2?? |
P210 |
| Pipelines |
12 |
16 |
| FP operations |
FP16, FP32 |
| DirectX |
DirectX 9.0c |
| Pixel shaders |
PS 3.0 |
| Vertex shaders |
VS 3.0 |
| OpenGL |
1.5+ (2.0) |
| Price |
$299 |
$399 |
| Availability |
May |
Site
Navigation
