Review: NVIDIA GeForce™ 6800 GT PCI Express

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Gallery

Here are some screenshots taken with the test GeForce 6800 GT card. Click on a thumbnail image below to download the original 2.25 MB bmp screenshot in 1024x768 resolution.

Conclusions

The PCIe GeForce 6800 GT offers excellent performance for its price. The card burned through SimHQ’s benchmark suite setting new highs in frame rates, with no visual glitches or anomalies, and no compatibility or stability issues. The GT boards could very well become the Ti 4200s of their generation. NVIDIA has also improved the image quality that is produced by their chips, with better anti-aliasing quality at 4x samples and support now for 16x anisotropic filtering. And the ForceWare driver panels give end users a simple yet elegant interface by which they can quickly adjust various settings and options; moreover, NVIDIA’s drivers have for months now supported individual game profiles, which enables users to easily apply different settings for each title they have installed.

The GeForce 6 series appears to herald NVIDIA’s return as a company that aggressively engineers chips capable of fighting for both the performance and technology crowns. The new design also signifies the company’s abrupt shift away from its former deep architecture of the FX chips with the 6800’s widely parallel pipelines and the substantial performance gains it realizes, positioning the board models very competitively for the different price points they address. And hardware support for Shader Model 3.0 and advanced features such as the high dynamic range and accumulation effects possible due to the full floating point precision formats and buffer blending set NVIDIA’s new GPUs apart from the competition. How much developer attention these features receive, however, will be determined by whether or not the PC gaming industry settles upon SM 2.0 or 3.0 as the primary inflection point for DirectX 9 support. Regardless, all else being equal — price, performance, compatibility, image quality, etc. — it is hard not to favor the part that offers more advanced, forward-looking features.

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