Nvidia 6800 specifications revealed

[Feuerwizard]

http://www.cooltechzone.com/images/reviews/video_cards/slmt%20033.jpg

Few weeks ago Nvidia, one of the top two graphics card makers, announced its GeForce 6800 Ultra video card. It currently stands as the undefeated champion in the video card market with beating its previous predecessor GeForce FX5950 and ATi Radeon 9800XT cards.

Nvidia plans to release two GeForce 6800 cards in Q2 of this year. One being the 6800 Ultra, the high-end card of the two, and the second one will be the GeForce 6800 non-ultra, the lower-end card. HartHardware, a German hardware site, has revealed the specifications of the 6800 non-ultra card today.

The lower-end 6800 non-ultra card will feature 12 rendering pipelines as opposed to 16 rendering pipelines in the 6800 Ultra card. The 6800 Ultra card features 400Mhz clock speeds, +/- 220 million transistors to form 16 pipelines, 6 vertex processors, a programmable video processor, and other important circuitry. The 6800 non-ultra card will run at 375Mhz clock speeds with either 128MB or 256MB DDR on-board memory. The 6800 Ultra cards carry GDDR3 on-board memory from Samsung and will likely to carry as much as 512MB on-board memory in future versions. The current 6800 Ultra cards carry 256MB memory that operates at 1100Mhz.

Both the 6800 Ultra and the 6800 non-ultra cards feature Pixel and Vertex Shaders 3.0 for optimal graphics performance.

The non-ultra card will mostly likely cost around $299.99 while the ultra version will sell for $499.99.

These new Nvidia offerings are expected to hit the store shelves either in May or June.

[SupaTroopa]

my next card will more than likely be Nvidia again as the ATI 9800 Pro gives me more crashes, anamolies and problems than it's worth (plus it's too expensive).

I don't know why people tout ATi cards so much, their drivers are garbage and their compatibility is a joke. I was concerned about bugs and problems with ATI cards before i even bought one, now I know why I haven't before.

Not only are they over-priced, the drivers are crap, they overheat way too easily, and in general are just very poorly made.

People tout how the FSAA modes on ATI cards are faster than Nvidia's - but that is because ATI's FSAA technology looks terrible...jaggies in the distance everywhere. Nvidia has very clean, sharp FSAA and that is why it takes more CPU/memory power to run in those modes - 2X Quincux FSAA with Nvidia looks better than ATI's 6x...it's a joke.

The last 3 Nvidia cards I've bought, I've had absolutely no problems with for the most part, every game worked on the same driver settings, the FSAA was superior visually, and everything was very intuitive, simple, streamlined and adaptive.

While ATI does have superior visual quality regarding textures and effects, it does not outweigh all of the problems, fixes, re-booting, and re-installing and patching I've had to do with my 9800 PRo.

Sincerely,

A guy who will never buy another ATI card again

[0x64657200 0x6A61636B616C00]

And on the OTHER side of point counter point.

I've not had one single problem with my ASUS ATI 9800XT (or their drivers especially since the 4.x's have come out) since I dropped it in my system. Well, other than the little fans were a tad loud for me when I rolled the system out to my living room for some Terminator 2 in Big Screen WMV-HD glory.

But then again, I never had any problems with my NVidia cards....so *shrugs*

Maybe, you are cursed or am I blessed? :P

[SupaTroopa]

Yeah i realize there will be plenty of people who have no prob's with their ATI cards and love their's.

i just upgraded from W98SE to XP Home and kind of screwed it up a bit by creating a very small partition (C drive) instead of partioning the entire drive - so I have two partitions on a 20 GB HDD and ATI drivers on both partitions and everything wants to install by default to the "C" drive....for which there is no room left to do so usually.

I have XP installed on both partitions...they are both bootable and it's a mess honestly...something I should've mentioned above.

Now I have to re-format and re-partition the drive - and am wondering if this has caused driver problems....so just having one large 20GB partition is my last hope I think...I will do that tonight hopefully.

I will post if this fixes the crashes I get in all of my games with the 9800 Pro.

I have to do a lot of tweaking/screwing around with the settings to get games to work properly (KOTOR, Far Cry, Painkiller all seem to have their unique issues with the card's drivers).

So I am just ranting as a result of my personal experience so far...again hopefully another clean swipe of my drive and only having one bootable partition with XP on it will solve these issues.

the games honestly run great and just crash after 10-15 min's of playing them now for apparently no reason (cannot be heat related either).

[0x64657200 0x6A61636B616C00]

Did you really perform a Win98 to WinXP upgrade? *faints*

[Bruenor]

Did you really perform a Win98 to WinXP upgrade? *faints*

:lol:

In all serious ST, it looks like you've got more issues with your PC than just the videocard right now. I think you have the right idea, wipe the slate clean and start over.

[SupaTroopa]

Well I formatted my HDD before upgrading to XP - so no W98SE elements were EVER involved in my upgrade...so I'm not sure what the big deal is.

The only thing the XP upgrade asks for is your W98SE Cd to verify you own it...literally takes 10 seconds to read it.

I basically screwed up my partitioning on the drive, but it should still work properly, technically...and did for a week or two...until last night when I did the dreaded "automatic XP upgrades" .....now every game crashes at some point and my PC reboots automatically.

I upgraded to XP because of the ATI card in the first place and the problems I was having with it on 98SE.

It simply shouldn't be this difficult, it's not as if i don't know what i'm doing....

[Bruenor]

Are there any known compatibility issues between your vid card and your other hardware (especially the mobo)? Might be something you want to look into. Might also want to (if you can that is) test the card on another system and see if the same problems appear. Could very well be a faulty card. I'm not the biggest ATI fan myself, but the 9800 series is a very solid card and to hear of this many problems is a little unusual to say the least.

You probably already thought of these, just thought I should throw them out there and try to help you out.

[0x64657200 0x6A61636B616C00]

Well I formatted my HDD before upgrading to XP - so no W98SE elements were EVER involved in my upgrade...so I'm not sure what the big deal is.

The only thing the XP upgrade asks for is your W98SE Cd to verify you own it...literally takes 10 seconds to read it.

It simply shouldn't be this difficult, it's not as if i don't know what i'm doing....

That's not what is normally defined as an upgrade then.

And I don't want to sound like more of an (_!_) than I normally am, but if you are complaining about your configuration and how you didn't do this or that right, then you kind of didn't know what you were doing :P

We should spawn this off somewhere else before the threadjacking police beat down my door....

[SupaTroopa]

That's not what is normally defined as an upgrade then.

I bought the XP upgrade disc and "upgraded" from W98SE to XP Home...I would certainly define that as an upgrade...I just happened to erase W98SE from my drive first...so, I apologize for not clarifying that originally.

Also, I do know what I'm doing, I re-partioned my drive last night and re-installed XP and Far Cry, and of course my ATI drivers. To assume anyone who has a problem with a piece of hardware or software "doesn't know what they're doing" is ridiculous.

In any case Far Cry doesn't want to work still, now I get graphical glitches and then an eventual PC re-booting crash or the game freezes up....guess I'll keep trying. Painkiller was doing the same thing (PC re-boots) before I re-installed XP.

Sorry for jacking the thread BTW.

[Ojnod]

Germans get everything right the first time, duh.

[0x64657200 0x6A61636B616C00]

I bought the XP upgrade disc and "upgraded" from W98SE to XP Home...I would certainly define that as an upgrade...I just happened to erase W98SE from my drive first...so, I apologize for not clarifying that originally.


Just for clarification sake;

Usually an upgrade in software is installing a newer version over the old version. Semantics? You bet, but it sure changes the landscape of the conversation when you're talking about system instability.

[SupaTroopa]

Well as you will see in my other thread it seems to be an over-heating and/or a power supply issue with the card. I will try connecting a different power connector to the vid card and maybe adding a more powerful fan or two for now (need them any ways I guess).

I'm not happy at all with the fact that I have to underclock it so severely just to get it to run games properly...any game. I just don't understand it at all...I know I have at least a 350W PSU (thought it was 420 or 400).

Oh why oh why did I not buy a 5900 series GF....

[Fzoulcmbyl]

We should spawn this off somewhere else before the threadjacking police beat down my door....


........ Knock..knock....knock...... Mr. von Binär?? Sir?.....


:D:



On a side note..... SKT, don't take offense bud, ..when you say you "knew what you were doing", you mean that you understand that you screwed up the partition, but you just haven't had a chance to fix it yet?...or that you don't know how to solve the problem?

I think that was the intent of Mr. von Binär's statement...


Fzoul

[DejaFu]

woot