Inno3D GeForce 6800 Review - 6800 Series Features and Specifications
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The GeForce 6800 is identical to the 6800 Ultra, except that it lacks four pipelines and has a slower core and memory clock. The core functionality of all the 6800s are the same. This includes:
- Support for DirectX 9.0 Vertex and Pixel Shader 3.0
- Displacement mapping support
- Vertex frequency stream divider
- Full pixel branching support
- Support for Multiple Render Target (MRTS)
- 65000+ instruction length program
- Up to 16 textures per rendering pass
- Support for 16-bit floating point format and 32-bit floating point format
- Support for non-power of two textures
- Support for sRGB texture format forgamma textures
- DirectX and S3TC texture compression
- Full 128-bit floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline (64-bit max precision to framebuffer and display)
When support for 2.0 shaders on accelerators first came out, everyone saw the capability through flashy tech demos, but no one really knew the benefits of the technology until games began supporting it. It was unknown at the time how soon support for the new shaders in games would emerge, but as we know today, it didn't take very long. While ATI has downplayed the importance of Shader Model 3.0, the fact remains that the X800 series does not support them while the 6800 series does (NVIDIA® CineFX™ 3.0 Technology). Far Cry touted SM3.0 support for a short while, until its 1.2 patch was recalled due to ATI "issues" - so hopefully it will not be long before 6800 users are seeing more benefits of this new shader technology.
A major factor why the 6800 series has been so popular with Doom 3 is NVIDIA® UltraShadow™ II Technology. It enhances the rendering performance of scenes with multiple light sources and objects. This second generation technology sports four times the shadow processing power over UltraShadow I. The result is more programming flexibility for game developers and more realistic lighting and shadow effects for gamers, all without compromising performance.
Finally, the 6800's superscalar design doubles the number of operations that can be executed per cycle compared to older architectures. This increases performance over single-shader non-scalar designs. Support for full 32 bit floating point precision while allowing 16 bit mode lets developers work with a broader range of situations. New programming flexibility results in increased shader performance and image sophistication. Meanwhile, NVIDIA's 64 bit texture implementation brings new standards for image clarity and quality through floating point capabilities in shading, filtering, texturing, and blending.
| GeForce 6 Series | 6800 Ultra | 6800 GT | 6800 |
| Core/Memory Clock (MHz) | 400/1100 | 350/1000 | 325/700 |
| Fill Rate (AA Sample / Sec) | 6.4 Billion | 5.6 Billion | 3.9 Billion |
| Verticies / sec | 600 Million | 525 Million | 406 Million |
| Memory Bandwidth | 35.2 GB/s | 32GB/s | 22.4 GB/s |
| Memory Interface | 256-bit GDDR-3 | 256-bit GDDR-3 | 256-bit DDR |
| Pixels per Clock (Peak) | 16 | 16 | 12 |
| Texture per Pixel* | 16 | 16 | 16 |
| Rendering Pipelines | 16 | 16 | 12 |
| *Maximum in a single rendering pass |
The GeForce 6800 pales in comparison to the GT and Ultra in terms of fill rate. Its decreased memory and core clocks are expected, but its absence of four pixel pipelines breaks NVIDIA's tradition of crippling cards within a series by simply altering clock rates. The power requirements for the three 6800s have been a topic of confusion, but the general recommendations from NVIDIA as of now for the 6800, 6800 GT, and 6800 Ultra are 300w, 300w, and 350w respectively. The Inno3D 6800 box states 300w as its PSU requirement, though due to the various qualities of power supplies, different users' mileage may vary. While all the 6800 cards support 128MB or 256MB memory, in most cases the 6800 has 128MB DDR and the GT and Ultra have 256MB DDR-3. The Inno3D GeForce 6800 has 128MB DDR memory.
Next: Inno3D 6800 Box Contents >>
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