Nvidia’s Geforce 6800 Ultra Performance Leap

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http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040414/index.html

http://www.warp2search.net/modules.php?nam...ticle&sid=17433 (http://www.warp2search.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=17433)

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=2023

Date: April 14th, 2004
Topic: Video Card
Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Author: Derek Wilson


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 brining out another image quality after ATI releases their card. One thing is for sure, both sides need to make sure they are genearting the highest quaity 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.

[atiVidia]

now that we have a reliable article, lets give a w00t! :w00t:

btw each individual strand of hair flows on its own. we have a winner!

[tesco]

Originally posted by atiVidia@14 April 2004 - 11:49
btw each individual strand of hair flows on its own. we have a winner!
very nice! B)

if ati comes out with a better fcard than the nvidia one, then the future of games is going to be very very awsome!

[adamp2p]

This is from www.hardocp.com


he Bottom Line

Here is what we know as of right now. The GeForce 6800Ultra will be priced at $499, contain 16 pipelines, require two Molex power connectors and in a two slot design clocked at 400/550. The GeForce 6800 will be priced at $299, contain 12 pipelines, require one Molex power connector, in a one slot design and clocks are yet to be decided.

We are certainly looking forward to getting our hands on retail GeForce 6XXX video cards in the near future and are expecting some soon. Quite frankly, we hope the hardware community can get back to discussing hardware this year and get away from discussing what one company did or did not do. NVIDIA has easily made a huge stride in the right direction with the GeForce 6800Ultra and it looks as if they are very much back on the map in terms of competitive 3D technologies.

Still, with all these great things said, NVIDIA is far from being off the hook in terms of competition. ATI's R420 VPU is looking to be a 16 pixel pipeline part and is being touted as a 600MHz monster. We all know that the real battle is fought in the mainstream trenches, but the winner of the high-end battle gets the bragging rights and it is unclear just yet who will get to do the bragging.


From Xbitlabs:


Conclusion
Today we had a chance to meet NVIDIA’s newest graphics processor formerly code-named NV40. Traditionally, this chip will be the ancestor of a new family of graphics processing units from the Santa Clara, California-based company. Without any doubts, the debut of the GeForce 6800 Ultra is a massive success for NVIDIA – we are very impressed by its performance and are confident that the new chip is the fastest graphics processor for gamers we have tested so far.

Synthetic tests we ran on the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra revealed that there are no dramatic drawbacks in the architecture of the chip. We are pretty optimistic about the balance of this architecture, its ability to scale in the future as well as performance the graphics processor is able deliver in today’s and tomorrow’s applications. Benchmarking of the real-world games just confirmed the theory – the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra demonstrated spectacular speed even in the most complex and high-quality modes.

Some disputes may begin concerning the new approach of anisotropic filtering NVIDIA employed into its novelty, nevertheless, we think that in overall the decision was right. Being very fast and not affecting performance too negatively, the new anisotropic filtering pattern is able to deliver excellent image quality in the majority of the cases. Improvements in full-scene antialiasing techniques are considered strictly positively as with breath-taking performance improvement we got fabulous image quality improvement too, something that we constantly expect from new generations of graphics processors.

Nevertheless, NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra is not only an impressive performaner in 3D games, but also has such advantages as:

Support for Pixel Shaders 3.0 and Vertex Shaders 3.0.
HPDR – new internal color representation.
Dramatically revamped pixel processor delivering amazing performance.
More powerful vertex processor compared to predecessors.
Built-in programmable video processor.
New anisotropic filtering pattern, even though, with some drawbacks.
New, improved full-scene antialiasing algorithm.
Bearing in mind the incredible performance NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra delivers in absolutely all types of games, including titles with plethora of Pixel Shaders 2.0, as well as support for promising Pixel Shaders 3.0, graphics cards based on the new NV40 chip have all chances to become the best choice of the Spring 2004, especially while the competitor – ATI R420 – is still under wraps and its performance is unclear.

NVIDIA claims that the NV40 architecture was developed with industry requirements as well as software developers’ requests in mind. In case this is correct, the company has all chances to receive multitude of positive feedback about the GeForce 6800 Ultra processor and its architecture. As a result of this, capabilities of the novelty are very likely to be utilized in future games and professional applications.

What is very important for us is that performance demonstrated by NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra is something that is achieved by using the complex of hardware and software, but not application-specific optimizations. Our own benchmark displays overwhelming speed improvement of the GeForce 6800 Ultra over the previous generations of chips. Given that Xbitmark is something that is available only in our labs, we are safe to say that NVIDIA ForceWare drivers contain no app-specific optimizations for this test and the power of NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra is something absolutely real.

Obviously, NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra has its drawbacks, but not a lot of them:

Too large cooling system.
Very strict requirements for PSU (480W).
Moderate overclockability (this may be a peculiarity of our graphics card).
Image quality issues with certain games and some bugs in drivers.
Nevertheless, such issues are resolvable on the whole.

Massive cooling system can be substituted with something more compact by actual makers of graphic cards. IBM has all what it takes to tweak its fabrication process to increase the yield and possibly overclockability if the NV40 chips.

Software development for the new graphics chips became a tricky task once GPUs became very complex and feature-rich. There are no surprises that certain games have image artifacts, video processor is not yet enabled and Pixel Shaders 3.0 do not function properly. Bugs and driver issues are inevitable nowadays and considering that the GeForce 6800 Ultra is not yet available, it makes no sense to blame developers for certain drawbacks with the software. Hopefully, once the GeForce 6800 Ultra hits the stores at $499 price-point, everything with the drivers will be resolved. On the whole, at this point we are pretty satisfied with the ForceWare 60.72.

To sum up, NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra is the world’s fastest graphics card with plethora of “beyond-DirectX 9.0” capabilities that is able to satisfy your needs today and tomorrow. Probably one of the best things around money can buy!

We are now looking forward for games to deploy all the spectacular features the new graphics processors have...