GeForce 6800 Ultra Preview - Page 3 - Technology

Alright then, let's get started. First let's talk a little about the graphics core. The core itself is build upon a 0.13 Micron Process technology which is fabricated at IBM. As rumors suggested the product indeed has a lot of transistors. I personally didn't count them but NVIDIA states 222 Million transistors! *phew* Imagine all that on a 40mm x 40mm FlipChip GPU running roughly 400 MHz. And in case you are wondering yes...the transistor count is higher than a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition.

Architecture Characteristics of the GeForce 6 Series

• Pixel pipelines: 16
• Superscalar shader: Yes
• Pixel shader operations/pixel: 8
• Pixel shader operations/clock: 128
• Pixel shader precision: 32 bits
• Single texture pixels/clock: 16
• Dual texture pixels/clock: 8
• Adaptive Anisotropic Filtering: Yes
• Z-stencil pixels/clock: 32

The silicon itself is of course PCI-Express ready yet the one we are talking about is running steady on AGP8x. PCI-Express has double the bandwith of AGP8x and another plus; it allows data to be sent in both directions.

Between the lines I can tell you that NV45 will be the PCI-Express version which will use the HSI/Bridge chip. Nice gossip, I was told by an NVIDIA representative that the GPU can actually handle AGP 16x internally...now think about PCI-Express again. The 6800 Ultra is equipped with the latest available in affordable yet really fast GDD3 memory; on the 6800 Ultra it is running at 1.2 GHz (2x600 MHz). BTW GDDR3 is designed in a way that its temperature is much cooler. It's likely we are going to see 6800 cards without ramsinks.

• 222 Million transistors
• 400 MHz Core Clock
• 600 MHz memory Clock
• 256-bit GDDR3 memory