We proceed with our tests of video cards based on NVIDIA GeForce 6800, which are gradually appearing on the market. It's a Low End model, which is intended to replace such previous High End cards as RADEON 9800 XT and GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. ATI does not yet have anything to offer in this segment, which could extrude RADEON 9800 XT from the market (or could at least dramatically drop its prices, which is however hardly possible because these cards are long out of production and stores offer the cards that were purchased by the dealers long ago at high prices).
But NVIDIA already has such products on sale at prices even lower than that of GeForce FX 5950 Ultra or RADEON 9800 XT, which is very pleasing. So, what is 6800? It's a 12-pipeline chip dressed into narrow CPU bus bandwidth. Indeed, you can see that the same memory operating not at 350 (700) MHz in GeForce FX5900 XT is installed on GeForce 6800. But for all that FX5900 XT has only 4 pipelines and 8 texture units (compare with 12 pipelines and 12 texture units). The NV40 core itself is not different from GeForce 6800 Ultra or GT in its features, it only has fewer pipelines.
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Review:
digit-life
Aug 13, 2004, 12:50 PM
