6800 Xt Views

General Goods

The first family in the GeForce 6 product-line, the 6800 series catered to the high-performance gaming market. As the very first GeForce 6 model, the 16 pixel pipeline GeForce 6800 Ultra (NV40) was 2 to 2.5 times faster than Nvidia's previous top-line product (the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra), packed four times the number of pixel pipelines, twice the number of texture units and added a much improved pixel-shader architecture. Yet, the 6800 Ultra was fabricated on the same (IBM) 130 nanometer process node as the FX 5950, and it consumed slightly less power.

Early benchmarks put the 6800 series at a disadvantage when compared to similarly priced ATI cards. Newer drivers have improved performance on both companies' products. Against the ATI's Radeon X800XT PE, its direct competitor, the 6800 Ultra performed comparably in most synthetic and game benchmarks, with each card showing its individual strengths in different gaming applications. Nvidia's part is strong in many applications programmed for OpenGL (a traditional strength of Nvidia), while ATI leads in many Direct3D applications. Thus, it is now generally accepted that the GeForce 6800 Ultra is similar in performance to the Radeon X800 XT, and that the GeForce 6800 GT generally performs better than the Radeon X800 Pro.

Like all of Nvidia's GPUs up until 2004, initial 6800 members were designed for the AGP bus. Nvidia added support for the PCI Express (PCIe) bus in later GeForce 6 products, usually by use of an AGP-PCIe bridge chip. In the case of the 6800 GT and 6800 Ultra, Nvidia developed a variant of the NV40 chip called the NV45. The NV45 shares the same die core as the NV40, but embeds an AGP-PCIe bridge on the chip's package. (Internally, the NV45 is an AGP NV40 with added bus-translation logic, to permit interfacing with a PCIe motherboard. Externally, the NV45 is a single chip with two separate silicon dies clearly visible on the top.) NV48 is NV45 with 512MB RAM.

Their 6600 series currently has three variants: the GeForce 6600LE, the 6600, and the 6600GT (in order from slowest to fastest.) The 6600 GT performs quite a bit better than the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra or Radeon 9800 XT, with the 6600 GT scoring around 8000 in 3DMark03, while the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra scored around 6000, and it is also much cheaper. Notably, the 6600 GT offered identical performance to ATI's high-end X800 PRO graphics card with drivers previous December 2004, when running the popular game Doom 3 (afterwards ATI optimized their drivers and was able to distance itself slightly from the 6600GT). It was also about as fast as the higher-end GeForce 6800 when running games without anti-aliasing in most scenarios.