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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mkruer - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
Well I hope this card is on par with ATi's or visa versa. ATi is planning to see their best at $500 pop and Nvidia is selling their at $400. How long to you think ATi is going to see their card for that price if the performance is virtually identical. Finally in the terms of the Power. Makes me wonder why PCI-Ex doesn’t include enough voltage from the socket? VPU's are getting to the point that they are just as powerful and complex as their CPU brethren, and will require the same power requirements as the CPU. Some one didn’t do their homework I guess. Well hears hoping that it will be in the next specification.quikah - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
Can you post some screen shots of Far Cry? The demo at the launch event was pretty striking so I am wondering if PS 3 were actually enabled since you didn't see any difference.Novaoblivion - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
Wow nice looking card I just hope the new ATI doesnt kick its ass lolRudee - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
When you factor in the upgrade price of a power supply and a top of the line CPU, this is going to be one heck of an expensive gaming experience. People will be wise to wait for ATI's newest flagship before they make any purchase decisions.Pete - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
Nice review, Derek. Some impressive performance, but now I'm expecting more from ATi in both performance (due to higher clockspeed) and IQ (I'm curious if ATi improved their AF while nV dropped to around ATi's current level). I also have a sneaking suspicion nV may clock the 6800U higher at launch, but maybe they're just giving themselves room for 6850U and beyond (to scale with faster memory). But a $300 12-pipe 128MB 6800 should prove interesting competition to a ~$300 256MB 9800XT.The editor in me can't refrain from offering two corrections: I'm pretty sure you meant to say Jen Hsun (not "Jensen") and well nigh (not "neigh").
Mithan - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
Looks like a fantastic card, however I will wait for the ATI numbers first :)PS:
Thanks for including the 9700 Pro. I own that and it was nice to see the difference.
dawurz - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
Derek, could you post the monitor you used (halo at 2048 rez), and any comments on the look of things at that monstrous a resolution?Thanks.
rainypickles - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
does the size and the power requirement basically rule out using this beast of a card in a SFF machine?Damarr - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
It was nice to see the 9700 Pro included in the benchmarks. Hopefully we'll see the same with the X800 Pro and XT so there can be a side-by-side comparison (should make picking a new card easier for 9700 Pro owners like myself :) ).DerekWilson - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
We are planning on testing the actual power draw, but until then, NVIDIA is the one that said we needed to go with a 480W PS ... even making that suggestion limits their target demographic.Though, it could simply be a limitation of the engineering sample we were all given... We'll just have to wait an see.