Despite its slower clock speeds, the GeForce 6800 is still a good performer. This is made possible due to its NV40 graphics core, which sports 12 pixel pipelines and a 325MHz graphics core. As a result of this combination, the GeForce 6800 has just enough pixel processing power and fill rate to outperform its predecessor, GeForce FX 5950 Ultra in most situations. In some cases, the margin is hardly noticeable, a perfect example of this would be in Lock On: Modern Air Combat. In fact, with AA enabled the 5950 Ultra comes out on top at high resolutions. Performance in Call of Duty was close between the two cards as well.
In other titles, the GeForce 6800 owns a decisive advantage. This was the case in UT and Splinter Cell, as well as Far Cry for the most part.
Considering the GeForce 6800’s shader model 3.0 support and its $300 price tag, it should definitely be an option among those of you who were shopping in that price range. Graphics cards that currently reside in that space include the GeForce FX 5950 and RADEON 9800 XT, so we have a feeling that the 6800 will do well for NVIDIA here: based on what we’ve seen, the GeForce 6800 is basically a well-oiled GeForce FX 5950 Ultra with shader model 3.0. This ensures the longevity of the board through at least 2005.
The real question for enthusiasts though is GeForce 6800 GT and RADEON X800 PRO. NVIDIA has detuned the GeForce 6800 just enough that for $100 more, you can get a more powerful graphics card, ensuring excellent performance in a wider variety of applications or with higher image quality. Many gamers will likely gladly pay a premium for this. Because of this, it will be important to see final street prices for the GeForce 6800/6800 GT and RADEON X800 PRO.
NVIDIA has prepared itself for this by going with more traditional DDR1 memory clocked at 350MHz, whereas the 6800 GT and X800 PRO are both GDDR3-based boards. When you couple this with the aggressive pricing NVIDIA and its board partners have shown in the past, a $250 GeForce 6800 card would not be inconceivable a few months from now.
Of course, ATI is rumored to be ready for this contingency, should it occur. The pipelines within the X800 graphics core can be disabled without affecting the rest of the chip. Because of this, it’s believed ATI may answer the GeForce 6800 with an 8-pipeline X800 SE board of their own. For right now though, the GeForce 6800 is the king of the lower half of the high-end segment.
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Budget Gaming PC Roundup
In this article, Jakes takes a look at three different $1,000 gaming PCs from CyberPower, iBuyPower, and MainGear PC. Each company took a different approach to tackling the $1,000 budget, and one company really stood out with their extraordinary build quality. See how the various PCs fared in our Budget Gaming PC Roundup!
PhysX Performance Update: GPU vs. PPU vs. CPU
After posting our PhysX story last week, many of you wrote in asking for PPU benchmarks, so today we've delivered! Armed with our original BFG PhysX card, we booted up an X48 Core 2 QX9650 testbed and re-ran the benchmarks. See how the PPU fared against the CPU and GPU in this quick article!
ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 Performance Preview
With 1600 shaders, 2.0GB of GDDR5 memory, and 2.4 TeraFLOPS of graphics horsepower, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is one impressive performer. See how the card stacks up running 8xAA against SLI GeForce GTX 280 and 260 in single card and 4-Way CrossFire. We've also thrown in 24xAA benchmarks as well. Is 2GB of memory really necessary? All the answers lie inside!
PhysX Performance with GeForce
Later this month NVIDIA will open up GeForce-based PhysX processing to their entire range of GeForce 8/9 and GTX 200 GPUs. In this article we take a look at their performance (as well as ATI's Radeon HD 4000 series), in four different PhysX applications. What kind of performance can you expect? Find out inside!
Overclocking the 6800
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