Conclusion

One benefit of newer hardware coming out is that the price on existing technology trickles down to lower price points. When the GeForce 7800 GTX and GT debuted, street prices on the PCI-E GeForce 6800 GT and Ultra GPUs quickly plummeted, but the mainstream segment wasn’t affected very much. Prices on the GeForce 6800 and GeForce 6600/6600 GT only fell another $10 or $15 at most.

With the debut of the GeForce 6800 GS, NVIDIA has finally addressed this important segment of the graphics market, and they didn’t do it lightly.

With dramatically higher clocks, over 100MHz on the graphics core and memory, the GeForce 6800 GS delivers considerably more performance than its predecessor in today’s latest games. F.E.A.R. performance is up by a factor of 1.5x at 1280x1024 without AA/AF, making the game playable at resolutions that just weren’t possible before with the GeForce 6800, while Quake 4 frame rates improved by over 20 fps in a few cases.

In our testing, the GeForce 6800 GS’ completely outclassed its intended competitor, the RADEON X1600 XT, in performance. In most of our benchmarks, the GeForce 6800 GS outperformed the X1600 XT by a double-digit margin. Thanks to its 256-bit memory interface and 500MHz memory, the GeForce 6800 GS really excels in comparison to the X1600 XT at high resolutions with AA/AF. The X1600 XT’s memory is clocked faster, but since it only has a 128-bit memory interface, the 6800 GS boasts nearly 10GB/sec more of peak memory bandwidth than the X1600 XT.

For even more performance, you can double up on GeForce 6800 GS boards for SLI. This buys you performance that’s even greater than the GeForce 7800 GTX for $500.

When you factor in price (both cards retail for the same $249 MSRP), the GeForce 6800 GS becomes even more of a no-brainer. As we said in our last Quake 4 performance article, ATI desperately needs to release a third X1800 SKU that’s tailored for the mainstream segment. In addition, they’re going to have to slash prices on their RADEON X1600 XT, as it just isn’t competitive with other cards in its price range.

With the debut of the GeForce 6800 GS, expect the GeForce 6800 and 6800 GT to slowly disappear. According to NVIDIA, the GeForce 6800 GS is “another hard launch” meaning that 6800 GS boards from third-party board vendors should be hitting retail shelves right about now. However, a quick scan of both Newegg and ZipZoomfly reveals that no 6800 GS cards have hit the market just yet, and only four board manufacturers have announced cards: XFX and PNY (both of which offer an overclocked GeForce 6800 GS SKU) and Leadtek and EVGA (who stick with the stock speeds). If recent history is any indication, when it does hit retail, prices could fall pretty quickly. This could make the GeForce 6800 GS a very popular upgrade this upcoming holiday season.

In our opinion, it’s the card to get at the $250 price point. ATI’s RADEON X800 XL delivers competitive performance thanks to its 16-pixel pipeline architecture, but with the lack of shader model 3.0 support, its shelf-life could be short-lived. With ATI introducing top-to-bottom SM3.0 hardware just recently game developers may have little incentive to include a custom 2.0b path for X700/X800-series hardware. Therefore, if you’re going to spend the money, you’d be better off with SM3.0 hardware.