NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra: The Next Step Forward
by Derek Wilson on April 14, 2004 8:42 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Card and The Test
This is our NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra engineering sample. No, it's not one slot, yes, it has 2 molex connectors, and generally its actually not very loud.
The 16x1 GeForce 6800 Ultra will be clocked at 400/550 (core/mem) and priced at $499, while its 12x1 little brother the GeForce 6800 non-ultra will be priced at $299 (clock speeds to be determined).
Here's a quick rundown of the key features:
. Vertex Shaders
° Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader 3.0
° Displacement mapping
° Vertex frequency stream divider
° 65000+ instruction length programs
. Pixel Shaders
° Support for DirectX 9.0 Pixel Shader 3.0
° Full pixel branching support
° Support for Multiple Render Target (MRTs)
° 65000+ instruction length programs
. Next-Generation Texture Engine
° Up to 16 textures per rendering pass
° Support for 16-bit floating point format and 32-bit floating point format
° Support for non-power of two textures
° Support for sRGB texture format forgamma textures
° DirectX and S3TC texture compression
. Full 128-bit floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline (64-bit max precision to framebuffer and display)
The chip is 222 Million transistors fabbed on a .13 micron process. Currently a 480W power supply and 2 free completely independent connections to the PSU are required. 8x Rotated grid multisample antialiasing, and 16x (128tap) anisotropic filtering are available.
Our test system:
AMD Athlon 64 3400+
1GB DDR RAM (OCZ Platinum at 2-2-3-6)
Seagate 120GB HD
PC Power & Cooling 510W ATX Power Supply
Other cards used in the tests:
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950
ATI Radeon 9800 XT
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
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Marsumane - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
This card owns... Anyone know when it ships to retail stores? Guesses even?SpaceRanger - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
I'd like to see what ATI comes up with before I make my decision. I rushed to judgement back when the GF4 TI4600 came out, and regretted making the quick call to buy. If I don't have to get a new PSU for the ATI solution, I'll consider it, even if performance is 5-10FPS slower. Adding 100 bucks to the already costly 500 for the card doesn't justify the expenditure.gordon151 - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
AtaStrumf is so right. More than likely you'll be able to buy the X800s before you can buy this.Shinei - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
Well, I'm sold. Yeah, that sounds fanboyish, but this thing is a solid performer and doesn't require me to completely replace my display drivers... Even if ATI wins by five FPS and has a lens flare in a forgotten corner of a screenshot that you have to stare at for ten minutes to spot, my money is going to NV40--assuming the prices come down a little. ;)Speaking of DX9/PS2.0, what about a Max Payne 2 benchmark? I'm curious what NV40 can do on that game with maxed out everything... :)
skiboysteve - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
i love anandtech's deep technical reviews but yall did no where near enough testing, the xbit article does a hell of allot more testing, 48 pages!http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/nv4...
the card fucking rapes everything.
the anand tests dont show nearly the rape the xbit ones do...
AtaStrumf - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
I find it really funny when people say that they will wait until ATi releases their X800 to make up their buying decisions.It's not you can run out and BUY this card right now or tomorrow. Of yourse you will wait. You don't really have a choice :)
ChronoReverse - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
The Techreport tested out the total power draw of this thing and it only drew slightly higher than the 5950 (both of which draws more than the 9800XT).So it seems the recommendation isn't actually necessary (and my Enermax enhanced 12V lines will take it easily).
Pete - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
mkruer #27, all the reviews I've read mention $500 for the 6800U, and $299 for a 12-pipe 128MB 6800.DerekWilson - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
#27,The 6800 Ultra (which we tested) will be priced at $500
The 6800 (with 12 pipes rather than 16) will be priced at $300
Pete - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
quikah #26: FarCry comparison screens are at HOCP.http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjA2LDU=
Apparently PS3 wasn't enabled, but the 6800U looks better than the 5950U running PS2. It's still uglier than the 9800XT, sadly. Banding abounds, both here and in FiringSquad's Lock-On screens. Puzzling, really. If the 6800U really runs FP32 as fast as FP16 within memory limits, I wonder if all it will take to get IQ on a level with ATi is forcing the 6800U to run the ATi path or removing the NV3x path's _pp hints.