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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Regs - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
Wow, very impressive. Yet very costly. I'm very displeased with the power requirments however. I'm also hoping newer drivers will boost performance even more in games like Far cry. I was hoping to see at least 60 FPS @ 1280x1024 w/ 4x/8x. Even though it's not really needed for such a game and might be over kill, however It would of knocked me off my feet enough where I could over look the PSU requirement. But ripping my system apart yet again for just a video card seems unreasonable for the asking price of 400-500 dollars.Verdant - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
i don't think the power issue is as big as some make it out to be, some review sites used a 350 W psu, and two connectors on the same lead and had no problems under loaddragonballgtz - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
I can't wait till December when I build me a new computer and use this card. But maybe by then the PCI-E version.DerekWilson - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
#11 you are correct ... i seem to have lost an image somewhere ... i'll try to get that back up. sorry about that.RyanVM - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
Just so you guys know, Damage (Tech Report) actually used a watt meter to determine the power consumption of the 6800. Turns out it's not much higher than a 5950.Also, it makes me cry that my poor 9700Pro is getting more than doubled up in a lot of the benchmarks :(
CrystalBay - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
Hi Derek, What kind of voltage fluctuations were you seeing... just kinda curious about the PSU...PrinceGaz - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
A couple of comments so far...page 6 "Again, the antialiasing done in this unit is rotated grid multisample" - nVidia used an ordered grid before, only ATI previously used the superior rotated grid.
page 8 - both pictures are the same, I think the link for the 4xAA one needs changing :)
Can't wait to get to the rest :)
ZobarStyl - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
dang ive got a 450W...sigh. That power consumption is really gonna kill the upgradability of this card (but then again the x800 is slated for double molex as well). I know it's a bit strange but I'd like to see which of these cards (top end ones) can provide the best dual-screen capability...any GPU worth its salt comes with dual screen capabilities and my dually config needs a new vid card and I dont even know where to look for that...and as for cost...these cards blow away 9800XT's and 5950's...it wont be 3-4 fps above the other that makes me pick between a x800 and a 6800...it will be the price. Jeez, what are they slated to hit the market at, 450?
Icewind - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
Upgrade my PSU? I think not Nvidia! Lets see what you got AtiLoneWolf15 - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - link
It looks like NVidia has listened to its customer base. I'm particularly interested in the hardware MPEG 1/2/4 encoder/decoder.Even so, I don't run anything that comes close to maxing my Sapphire Radeon 9700, so I don't think I'll buy a new card any time soon. I bought that card as a "future-proof" card like this one is, and guess what? The two games I wanted to play with it have not been released yet (HL2 and Doom3 of course), and who knows when they will be? At the time, Carmack and the programmers for Valve screamed that this would be the card to get for these games. Now they're saying different things. I don't game enough any more to justify top-end cards; frankly, and All-In-Wonder 9600XT would probably be the best current card for me, replacing the 9700 and my TV Wonder PCI.