GeForce 6 series: Difference between revisions

The GeForce 6 Series is nVidia's newest series of graphics processors.

The first model, the GeForce 6800 Ultra (NV40) was launched on April 14th 2004. It was intended to readress the issues that the GeForce FX series had come under fire for (namely underwhelming performance and below-par texture filtering), and did this in stunning fashion, not only matching ATI Technologies's Radeon cards in image quality, but being approximately 50-80% faster than the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and the Radeon 9800XT, the previous leaders. This type of performance increase had not been seen since 3dfx released their Voodoo 2 graphics processor, which had a comparable performance increase over the original Voodoo. The chip was actually clocked lower than the 5950 Ultra had been, but usage of high-speed GDDR-3 memory and double the number of pixel processing units allowed the 6800 Ultra to massively outstrip it's predecessor. The GeForce 6800 will continue using the new 130 nanometer process, introduced with the GeForce FX. Its Quadro equivalent is the Quadro FX 3400.

However, there are two early concerns - namely the power draw from the card, which needed two PSU connectors to work adequately (though the PCI-Express version should alleviate this requirement). It had been shown with tests that the ATI's new Radeon X800 performs marginally better in some games, although the GeForce 6800 Ultra did slightly better in benchmarking tests.

nVidia will not be introducing budget or mainstream versions of the GeForce 6 for some time; for now, existing GeForce FX chips will continue to fill these roles.