NV40
- January 2005 (April 2004)
The 6800 series marks the start of the Return of 3DFX. Indeed, the
Scan-Line Interleave of old has become the new horse on which nvidia is betting the farm. This
already powerful GPU in its own right can be combined with another like
it to give a much bigger boost in graphical quality, although not
always in framerate.
No matter, fans are overjoyed by the sheer performance of this new
shining beacon of technology.
As for me, I and many others are unhappy with just one thing : the
total unavailability of the cards. The date above is the date at which
I finally found a web site who actually carried a few models (followed
by the "paper" release date). I was
quick to decide and snap up mine, but January 2005 is many months after
the company's "official" release in April the year before. So many that
the user base raised so
much hell about the lack of cards that nvidia actually took notice. Either
that, or somebody got a ruler on the fingers for lack of financial
performance. The latter is probably more likely.
Tech Sheet (updated : July 22, 2003)
|
Ultra |
"vanilla" |
| RAMDAC |
2x400 Mhz |
|
| Transistor count (millions) |
222 |
|
| Technology |
0.13µ |
|
| Frequency |
450 Mhz |
325
|
| Onboard RAM |
256MB DDR3 |
128 DDR1
|
| RAM bandwidth |
33.6 GB/s |
|
| RAM bus width |
256 bits |
|
| RAM bus frequency |
550 Mhz GDDR3 |
350Mhz DDR
|
| Pixel fill rate |
27.2 GPixels |
|
| Texel fill rate |
6.4 billion/s
|
|
Vertices
|
600
million/s
|
|
| Render pipes |
16 |
12
|
| Pixel per Clock (per pipe) |
16 |
|
|
 |
Ironically, the 6800 has no sooner been available, in vanishingly small
quantities, to the consumer, that the 7800 is announced. And what an
announcement : it would seem that a 7800 Ultra is capable of overtaking
two 6800s in SLI configuration !
Well, that ends the argument about whether or not SLI is actually a
good thing for the 6800.