Printable View
NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions, introduced today the NVIDIA® GeForce™ 6800 models of graphics processing units (GPUs) for high-performance desktop computers.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_12687.html
I see the reviews..
Look VERY IMPRESSIF!! Allmost 100% better that a Radeon 9800 XT (Who the top right now)..
I cannot wait for ATI X800 Card!!!
Simon,
Calm down :D ATI will announce their new one within 6 weeks?............that's the way it goes?
What bothers me is that it seems that the more competitive they get, the worse the drivers are?
Just my thoughts
Drivers suck!! Imagine that card can do with good drivers!! *HUGE*
ATI will annonce their video card the 15 of May and shipped it the 15 of May while Nvidia will only shipped in June...
But a that much video performance is bad ass! :)
Just to clarify, there are some abundant differences between the two cores. The review samples of the GeForce 6800 Ultra the reviewers got were 400MHz cores, with a 16x1 architecture. The review samples of the ATI X800Pro will be clocked at 600MHz core, with a 12x1. ATI will be following up towards the end of June with a 16x1 part clocked at 600MHz core. Performance wise, disregarding shader performance, the two cards should be closely matched, as there are companies like Albatron who have already announced they will have GF6800U parts clocked at 600MHz core. If however the GF6800Us stay by and large clocked at 400MHz, they will perform raw fill-rate wise on par with the 12x1 ATI part @ 600MHz.
NVidia will have to up the core clock to be able to beat the 12x1 ATI part in raw fillrate tests. Note that raw fillrate isn't the be all and end all of graphics processing, but it DOES have a significant impact on how much can be rendered on the screen at any one time.
It's really quite simple math:
NV 6800Ultra:
400 MHz x 16 pipelines
= 400 clock ticks per second x 16 simultaneous operations per clock tick
= 6400 operations per second
A 6800 Ultra clocked at 600 MHz gives 9600 pixel ops per second.
ATI X800Pro:
600 MHz x 12 pipelines
= 600 clock ticks per second x 12 simultaneous operations per clock tick
= 7200 operations per second
The ATI X800XT which will have 16 pipelines will also put out 9600 pixel ops per second.
Note those numbers are theoretical, and do not take into account things like Z-Buffering, the extremely good fast-clearing tech they use, texture compression, and so on. All those things will affect the overall performance of the cards. That's part of the fun of new rounds of hardware, seeing how close they get to achieving their theoretical performance. :P
Declaring the winner may come down to price and how they perform in departments other than raw fillrate, though it seems rather clear that the NV GF6800 will be beaten by its competitor, the X800Pro.
ie: Pixel Shader Support and speed, AntiAliasing speed and quality, Anisotropic Filtering speed and quality, etc..
More interesting may also be the difference in the approach to PCI-E. ATI is building PCI-E boards, whereas NVidia will be building all NV40 based cards using an AGP to PCI-E bridge. What this means is NV will likely be able to offer the NG40 based PCI-E cards cheaper than ATI, but potentially at a performance loss, although I doubt it given we have only just recently started using the additional bandwidth provided by AGP8X over AGP4X.
At any rate, I'll link a few reviews of the X800Pro when it is released. :)