NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra: The Next Step Forward

Final Words

Similar to Anand's 9700 Pro introduction, the GeForce 6800 has set some pretty solid standards. We can now expect:

1) Very high performance in current and future games.
2) The ability to play at 2048x1536 in just about any game currently available or soon to be made available, and
3) The ability to play virtually any game at 1600x1200 with 4X AA and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled at smooth frame rates.

Of course, we aren't crowning any kings yet, as ATI will soon be making its mark on this generation of GPUs. We will have to wait to find out what they can bring to the table, but it is definitely turning out to be an exciting battle. Even with the added power requirements, the kinds of performance gains we have seen are pretty substantial, and ATI will have a good fight on their hands.

We were able to achieve very smooth frame rates under Halo at 2048x1536, and 34fps under FarCry at the same resolution. Unfortuantely, the driver is currently not stable enough to do all the testing we wanted at this resolution, so we'll have to hold off on bringing a full set of benchmarks to the table until later.

Even though we have taken a cursory glance at anisotropic filtering and antialiasing, and we didn't notice any glaring problems while testing games, we will need to revisit the issue of image quality. We are planning on bringing out another image quality after ATI releases their card. One thing is for sure, both sides need to make sure they are generating the highest quality images to avoid recurrences of last years many controversies.

We are looking forward to the next month of battle, and we hope you are as excited as we are to see how this plays out.