NVIDIA Geforce 6800 (NV40) Launch
NVIDIA Pulls Out All The Stops; Aims For New Heights:
 The Launch Stage |
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Last night Nvidia unveiled the newest Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), code-named the NV40, to the cheers and aplause of hundreds in San Francisco. Nvidia has been chasing their rival ATI, but Nvidia now feels that after ~18 months of research and development by Nvidia’s leading engineers that they have once again overtaken the number one spot in the graphics market. Nvidia has announced that the new chips will be referred to as the Geforce 6800 and the Geforce 6800 Ultra. Nvidia was very happy to tell the audience that the new Geforce 6800 series has twice the graphics performance than that of their previous generation GPU’s – the Geforce 5900 series. This is performance that can be had right out of the box and even better yet — at the same price point.
The NV40 Reference Card:
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When the last generation of Nvidia cards came out the cooling solution was bulky and honestly sounded like a hairdryer gone out of control. The Nvidia NV40 designers didn’t want another repeat of that situation and they can sit back and relax because the cooling solution on the Geforce 6800 series seems to be on par with expectations. The Geforce 6800 Ultra comes with 256mb of DDR3 memory. Nvidia went with DDR3 for many reasons, but the most obvious are: blazing memory clock speeds, lower power consumption, and lower temperatures. Expect ATI, S3 and other graphics card companies to follow Nvidia’s lead and implement DDR3 memory here in the near future. One thing that is worth pointing out is that ATI was the first to announce that they would be using DDR3 about six months ago, but Nvidia beat them out of the gates and already has cards in the hands of product analysts with DDR3!
So far things are looking good!
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