All the hardware sites have their previews in, looks to be a very fast card. Though in some games it was only slightly faster than the 9800xt, in some it blew it away. Such as halo.
http://www20.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040414/feforce_6800-40.html
What’s this absolutely ridiculous power-supply-sized monster on the back of the poor little card? Jesus. Can’t be long until you need an external case for the latest Nvidia card.
That would be the overkill drive.
They’ve been doing that for awhile for the higher-powered Quadro cards (for CAD/engineering/visual design apps) so that’s not really too surprising they’re gonna use it now. Remember the Voodoo 5 6000 needed one too, way back in the day.
— Alan
Didn’t the V5 need a whole separate power supply?
Yeah - close enough I guess :)
— Alan
That’s quite hefty for a video card.
I’ll be waiting to see how the XT version (16 pipe) of ATI’s upcoming R420 cards performs in comparison (not to mention the cheaper non-ultra Nvidia 6800) and buying whatever looks like the best long-term solution (won’t really know until ATI shows their hand shortly).
Hmm… who to trust, Tomshardware or HardOCP, techreport, etc… definitely not tomshardware.
Previews that benchmarked halo did show a significant performance increase-- probably because the drivers were tuned specifically for that game, since the gffx was historically a bad performer in it. Farcry seems to be more representative of the true performance difference of 10-20% over a 9800xt.
Anyone think ati’s r400 will show a mere 20% speedup? Not me.
nVidia isn’t going to hold on to that gold star for long.
HardOCP did not do a standard comparison (note that the settings are different for every card - they’re doing a “qualitative” comparison). I didn’t find it terribly useful for evaluating performance gains. YMMV.
Anand shows some pretty impressive numbers (especially at my preferred (LCD-locked :P) 1280*1024 res with AA/Aniso turned up). Haven’t checked TR, though they’re usually pretty solid reviewers.
Depends how long term you’re looking. If it’s long enough for games to actually ship taking advantage of shader 3.0 features and high-dynamic range rendering the 6800 gets the nod. The R420 is really just a performance boost.
Good point about PS 3.0.
The 32x0 mode helping with dynamic shadows is also very interesting (Doom3 is really gonna like that). But I still don’t feel comfortable discounting R420 until we see its performance.
How do you know?
How do you know?[/quote]
I didn’t say that :P but I think he’s referring to the lack of PS 3.0 support - I haven’t heard about any other feature advancements in that card yet.
Dude. No way. Dude. Eating babies is wrong. Dude. So wrong.
…sorry.
lol :)
That tech demo (ogre eating babies) is terrific. Oldie but goody.
There’s a bit more to R420 than a mere performance boost, but regardless NV40 will definitely hold the features crown (if not overall speed, but we’ll have to wait 'n see).
Here’s a screenshot grabbed today by a regular B3D poster, Democoder, that shows displacement mapping support in Far Cry on a 6800U:
Very nice looking! Much better than what my 9800 Pro renders.
Please keep in mind that DirectX 9.0c isn’t out, and thus Pixel Shader 3.0 isn’t actually enabled, even on Far Cry, which has been patched to support it.
How do you know?[/quote]
I didn’t say that :P but I think he’s referring to the lack of PS 3.0 support - I haven’t heard about any other feature advancements in that card yet.[/quote]
Yeah, the R420 feature set is still a questionmark, though most don’t expect full 3.0 Shader supprt, just a monster 2.0 card. It’s also a question as to how prominent 3.0 Shader support will be in software, whether we’re going to see a lot of the advanced abilities it includes, or if it will mostly be employed to make 2.0 effects more efficient.
The NV40 does look fantastic right now. The performance is really impressive, especially when you scale the resolution and AA/AF. Even that pig Halo seems to march at a good clip with the 6800 Ultra. But with ATI’s rumored 16 pipe, 600 Mhz beast just around the corner… Just don’t make any preorders you can’t cancel. Sounds like the Radeon X800XT is going to street about the same time as this nVidia card.
At least it isn’t a piece of shit. That would have been pretty ugly. Here’s hoping nVidia is working on a discreet PCI Express sound solution. That’s what I really want!
Why would you need a PCI-E sound card? It’s not like sound requires that much bandwidth or power.