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The GeForce 6800 GS 256 MBA high-range performing graphics card for an almost mid-price.

You my friends .. it was June the 22nd in 2004 when we first took a peek at NVIDIA's new born, the GeForce 6800 GT. It offered staggering performance and I was lie "wow" the rumors where true. We are now a good year away from that first release and a couple of things have changed in that time-frame. Most importantly we noticed a massive shift from the AGP platform towards PCI-Express. Secondly in that timeframe prices came down. You can now pickup a 6800 GT for 325 USD or 275 EUR these days. Fact is this product is still offering staggering 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 and there is a little gap in the market between the plain GeForce 6800 and the GeForce 6800 GT. SO NVIDIA figured .. hey .. let's fill 'er up !

Tagged with a sales price of roughly 250 EUR - 275 USD for the 256 MB models there now is another product available in that very broad range of Series 6 product 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 between the 6800 and 6800 GT.

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. So where is that extra performance coming from you are asking ? Well there are two explanations for it. Focus on the chart below where I sited the more important specs.

Product Name

# pixel processors

# vertex processors

Bus width

Memory Type/Amount

GPU Speed

RAM Speed

GeForce 6800 Ultra **

16

6

256-bit

GDDR3/256MB

400MHz

1100MHz

GeForce 6800 GT

16

6

256-bit

GDDR3/256MB

350MHz

1000MHz

GeForce 6800

12

5

256-bit

GDDR/128MB

325MHz

700MHz

GeForce 6800 LE

8

4

256-bit

GDDR/128MB

320MHz

700MHz

** Not manufactured anymore

As you can see NVIDIA is doing two important things with the new GS, firstly they made sue that the core frequency is clocked a good 25% faster over the vanilla 6800. Next to that they armed the GS with more high-end gDDR3 memory which now runs at a 500 MHz clock (that's effectively 1000 MHz). So can you smell the performance increase already ? Interestingly enough this product might swing towards and over GT performance here and there due to the high framebuffer bandwidth and high than GT core frequency.

Devine, let's get acquainted with that we are talking about today and that would be the muscular named GeForce 6800 GS; I predict it is going to be a nice product in terms of bang for your bucks in the high-end graphics gaming arena.

Point of View's GeForce 6800 GS 256 MB