04-15-2004, 07:00 PM
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Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 2,968
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Mindblowing Graphics Coming Soon To A PC Near You
The new nVidia and ATI chips are finally here. The hype about the NV40 and the R420 chips from the two respective companies has been going on for several months now. We have all (ok, at least all us gamers) been waiting anxiously for Doom 3 and Half Life 2 for months/years and Id and Valve have been torturing us by delaying the games for what seems like forever. In any case, it was obvious that none of the current generation of cards (the ATI 9800 or the GeForce 5900) were going to be able to play either game smoothly, thus the crazy yearning for the next-gen cards from the two graphics cards giants. Well, nVidia finally announced the release of their GeForce 6800 cards with the NV40 chip. There have been several articles on the specs already.
"With a mind-boggling 222 million transistors on-board - that's just short of 80 per cent more than Intel's latest Prescott CPU - nVidia claims that the GeForce 6800 Ultra will deliver up to eight times the pixel shading performance of its previous generation hardware. It should also deliver up to twice the vertex shader performance and close to twice the frame buffer bandwidth. On top of that it should also offer four times the shadow processing power and be up to four times more efficient at dealing with hidden surface removal. All this should have a massive impact on future games, with more advanced light and shadow effects than anything seen before." The new chips can handle GDDR 3 SDRAM across a 256-bit memory interface. Memory runs at 1.1GHz on the 6800 Ultra for 32.5GBps of bandwidth. The Ultra can churn out 6.4 billion texels per second and process 600 million vertices in the same time.
Nvidia's also touted the parts' on-chip programmable video processing engine. That already gives it support for MPEG 2 and WMV 9 with motion compensation which can also be applied to other formats, such as MPEG 4, H.264 and DiVX. Its programmable nature makes it particularly suitable for pro tasks such as '3:2 pulldown', the process of converting an moving image encoded as interlaced fields to a frame-based picture sequence more suitable for playback on a computer display. It can also be put to gamma correction, colourspace conversion and a host of video effects. Apparently, people that have seen this card in action have said that watching a movie through this card made them look extremely cinematic.
Having said all this about nVidia's new card, onto the current market leader ATI. They will be releasing a very similar card, the X800 Pro with the R420 chip, which is set to be a 6800 competitor and the more we read about the two cards/chips, we realize how incredibly similar they are. ATI plans to make the announcement about their card on April 26th. ATI is also planning to release the x880 XT, PCI-Express version of their card by June 14th.
Pricing and Availability: So this is what I can gather as of right now. Since the ATI card has not been announced yet, the ATI pricing is not available yet but I am guessing that it will be exactly the same as nVidia's cards. The GeForce 6800Ultra will be "priced at $499, contain 16 pipelines, require two Molex power connectors and in a two slot design clocked at 400/550. The GeForce 6800 will be priced at $299, contain 12 pipelines, require one Molex power connector, in a one slot design and clocks are yet to be decided."
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