NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS Preview

[MikeC]

We have posted a brief preview of NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 GS, which is being announced today. It has been a hectic weekend, but also enjoyable as we played around with Quake 4, FEAR, and Half-Life 2: Lost Coast.

The GeForce 6800 GS is designed around the NV42 core and utilizes the PCI-Express interface. The 110nm fabricated GPU operates at a reference clock speed of 425MHz while add-in graphics cards will be outfitted with 256MB of GDDR3 frame buffer memory running at a frequency of 500MHz.

Although the GeForce 6800 GS is replacing the GeForce 6800, its specifications are closer to that of the GeForce 6800 GT, which currently ranges in price from $275 to $300. The GeForce 6800 GS has fewer pipelines and vertex processors than the GeForce 6800 GT, but it matches and exceeds the GeForce 6800 GT in memory bandwidth and geometry processing, which is partially the result of a 21% increase in the GPU clock speed.

http://www.nvnews.net/previews/geforce_6800_gs/images/card_pic_1s.jpg

http://www.nvnews.net/previews/geforce_6800_gs/index.shtml

[OWA]

Nice preview Mike. It looks good but like you noted, it could face competition from other cards in nvidia's lineup. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

[SH64]

Awesome .. this GS card seems to fall right into the spot of price/performance card & dont forget that you can SLI it.
looks like its putting an end for the X1600XT (http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2005q4/geforce-6800gs/index.x?pg=7) even before its launch!!

[saturnotaku]

So it's basically a speed-bumped 6800NU. Not that that's a bad thing, but it looks like NVIDIA has hit the mark in the price/performance area.

[MikeC]

Some good deals on them already:

http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/SubCategory.asp?SubCategory=48

http://www.evga.com/products/moreinfo.asp?pn=256-P2-N386-AX

http://www.mwave.com/mwave/viewspec.hmx?scriteria=AA39230

http://www.monarchcomputer.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=M&Product_Code=190443&Category_Code=nvidia-PCI-E

[OWA]

Impressive. Available on launch and already selling for less than the suggested retail price. :)

[BrianG]

New Egg is at $209? Stunning.

Slap a Zalman on it, perfect HTPC card for a 720p display...

[Joe Public]

A heir to the 6800GTs throne could be nice. Looking at the SLI scores, it didn't look too impressive. But a good competitor to ATIs midrange offerings.

[MikeC]

Here is a link to a 320x240 MPEG-1 video (with audio) of the Quake 4 gameplay scenerio I used in the preview. It's a little over 20MB.

http://www.nvnews.net/videos/quake4/quake4_gameplay_1.mpg

[JonathanM]

Nice work once again Mike.

[Rytr]

Nice preview. Looks like a 'sleeper' with the street price of $200.

[superklye]

So it's basically a speed-bumped 6800NU. Not that that's a bad thing, but it looks like NVIDIA has hit the mark in the price/performance area.
Or a crippled Ultra...the real kicker for this is that it's got the DDR3. If it was just DDR like the NU, this would be such a bust card.

nVIDIA just can't seem to do anything wrong. :)

[Daydre@m]

Great preview and excellent card from Nvidia :D . These days nvidia aint giving ATI any chance in any arena whether its low-end or high-end .

Btw , ClubIT has it for $199.99 ( Free Fed-Ex shipping and No Tax :cool: )

http://www.clubit.com/product_detail.cfm?itemno=A9602793

[saturnotaku]

Or a crippled Ultra...the real kicker for this is that it's got the DDR3. If it was just DDR like the NU, this would be such a bust card.

Sorry, I meant to compare it to the PCI-E 6800NU, which is 256 MB DDR3, just much lower clocked. It's listed in the chart in the preview. :o

Once I find work, I think I'll be ordering myself one of these. Suchadeal.

[Clay]

I really liked how you included the frame rate line graph over time. It's a really nice balance between that and traditional FPS results. :cool:

[Rytr]

Newegg now has the EVGA 6800GS listed at $199.99.

[johns1234]

I have a CAD lab with 41 Dell Dimension 9100s using the nVidia GF 6800 GS.
So far, my tests indicate that this card is badly crippled and performs
poorly in games like Far Cry. I have Far Cry patched to 1.33, and am
using the 81.95 video driver. If I put the in-game settings to Very High,
the card simply cannot handle it. In levels such as Bunker, I get black
ceilings and transparent walls. And the FPS drops to about 5 .. basically
a slide show. The only way I can play through this level is to drop the
in-game settings to Medium and turn AA OFF. In levels where the card
seems to run well, I tried running HDR using the console command
\r_hdrrendering 1 ( the lowest level ). The graphics turned into a
garish display of bright pinks and blues. I tried lowering the in-game
settings and made sure AA was turned OFF, and got no improvement.
I tried two different Dell 9100s, and got the same results. I also ran
several graphics benchmarks .. like 3DMark2001SE which gave a bench
of 14,200 .. very poor. I have an ATI 9800 Pro in an AMD64 system
which benches at about 19,000 running the same OS and configuration.
I can set the 9800 to all Very High settings in Far Cry and the game
runs well and the graphics look super good. I talked to Dell Tech Support
and they had me run Msconfig and turn off all unnecessary services
and reboot to see if the condition was something running in the back
ground. I got no change at all. The 6800 GS simply cannot run Far Cry
with settings to Very High.

[Clay]

What are your system specs? Without those your post doesn't mean very much.

[saturnotaku]

What are your system specs? Without those your post doesn't mean very much.

Exactly. There could be other factors at play here, including power supply on the hardware end and driver residue from a previous video card on the software end.

Don't just write off a piece of hardware until you've done a thorough troubleshooting process.

[johns1234]

What are your system specs? Without those your post doesn't mean very much.

Pretty obvious to a tech .. but .. Dell Dimension 9100 with
all the bells and whistles. And I am a senior computer tech with
40+ years in the field, supporting 1200 Engineering students at
the University of Idaho. The 9100 has 1 gig ram with hyperthreading
enabled ( matched pairs ). 160 gig SATA. And is probably one of
the best commercial Workstations on the market. I run AutoCAD
2006, Solidworks, Land Desktop, etc with no problems. I'm testing
my systems to anticipate future work in much higher level 3D
Presentation graphics involving Engineering projects of all kinds.
Obviously, this version of the GF 6800 has been crippled to give
it a sales advantage in a declining video-games market. In the
future, I am going to try to enable the remaining 4 pipes, and
possibly restore this card to its potential. I have also run AquaMark3
and again noted the low FPS ( in the 20s ) that this crippled
card generates. I also tested an XFX GF 6800 128 to see if it
was just a poor manufacturer, but the XFX card was worse ..
much worse. It failed in simple presentation graphics where I
was trying to rotate and view Solidworks 3D parts. If any of
you want to darken my door and see this for yourselves, I would
gladly show you, and you can try to prove me wrong right in
my test lab. Email: snaken@uidaho.edu .. my name is John
... or call me I'm willing to try your suggestions
and I have a 9100 with Far Cry installed sitting right by the
phone.


Edited by MikeC - removed phone number.

[johns1234]

Exactly. There could be other factors at play here, including power supply on the hardware end and driver residue from a previous video card on the software end.

Don't just write off a piece of hardware until you've done a thorough troubleshooting process.

I've done all of that 'til a cow gives beer. If you have any ideas
what else I could do, pick up the phone. I'm sitting right here 10
hours a day 5 days a week. I'm a professional computer tech ...
( not bragging about it ) .. and I speak geek pretty well.
I even called Dell Tech Support, and ran all of their video tests.
We both concluded that the GF 6800 GS is limited in its performance.

[saturnotaku]

Damnit, I had a nicely-worded reply but the forum kicked me off and it didn't get posted.

Instead of going through the trouble, I'm going to tell you that your experience flies in the face of every single review of this card; posting your phone number on a public forum is pretty boneheaded; lose the attitude you're displaying here; and for the love of God, stop hitting return after every line you type.

[johns1234]

Damnit, I had a nicely-worded reply but the forum kicked me off and it didn't get posted..

Well, I'm a pro in this field, and this card ( all 41 of them ) is showing
me nothing special. I've posted to the Far Cry discussion site, and
gamers have been seeing these problems with the GF6 series since
2004. I have also posted to Usenet ( alt .. nvidia ) where "Ant" and
I both tried to solve this problem with a 6800. I gave up, he is
still posting on it with little or no solution. I have installed and tested
using Coolbits, Rivatuner, and another tweaker .. all to no effect or
improvement of any kind. I have moved 6800s to 4 different high-
end systems newly installed, and nothing changes. My hardware is
new, expensive, and fully tested in every aspect, and I can only
conclude that the "reviewers" out there are getting "special" cards
to work with. This has been a problem for reviewers for a long time,
and that is well documented. You need to go down the street, and
just buy a card off the shelf and test what the rest of us get.
As for me posting my name, etc ... well, :-) I dare somebody to
try to hack this University. We will be in your door so quick you
won't be able to say "habius corpus" .. and if you send nasty emails,
Postini will gobble it down, and I won't get to read it. Be nice :-)

[superklye]

Maybe I'm just an idiot, but I was under the impression that, say an XFX 12-pipe, NV40-based 6800GS was the same whether it was bought off a store shelf or shipped straight from them for us to review. But maybe store-shelf 12 is less than shipped-from-XFX 12? I'm no pro after all... :rolleyes2

[saturnotaku]

You need to go down the street, and
just buy a card off the shelf and test what the rest of us get.

Read this

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/msi_geforce_6600gt_sli/index.shtml

Pay special attention to the bolded part:

I decided to migrate my AMD Athlon 64 3500+ processor from an NVIDIA nForce3 Ultra AGP system to the nForce4 SLI chipset. My intention was to sell my motherboard and AGP GeForce 6800 GT, purchase the SLI board and one PCI-Express GeForce 6600 GT. We contacted MSI and they came through and provided a second GeForce 6600 GT. Thanks to a special at an online retailer, here's what I ended up purchasing.

Would you like fries with that crow?

As for me posting my name, etc ... well, :-) I dare somebody to
try to hack this University. We will be in your door so quick you
won't be able to say "habius corpus" .. and if you send nasty emails,
Postini will gobble it down, and I won't get to read it. Be nice :-)

You mistake me for someone of below-average intellect. Get over yourself.