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Geforce 6800 Ultra / NV40 Reviews

@ 2004/04/14

My preliminary conclusion:

* not (much) faster on 'normal' resolutions (<= 1024*1280) than the 9800XT or if it is faster, the 9800 is still fast enough
* consumes 50% more power than current high end cards (75W vs. ~110W)
* image quality is better than GF FX series, but equal or worse (FarCry pretty much sucks) than the ATI 9800 series.

Imho only a good buy for someone who doesn't mind noise, has plenty of money and likes to play everything on 1600*1200.

Comment from RichBa5tard @ 2004/04/14

The Hexus review is indeed promesing. it sheds a different light on the matter than previous articles i've read.

24k 3D01 marks at stock speed.

Comment from Sarcastro @ 2004/04/14

Quote:

Originally posted by jmke
3DM03 score effect can also be seen in Halo and Farcry, or any other bench/game which uses shaders and DX9 "stuff"

I'm as impressed as you by it, after reading only the hexus review.

Comment from Sarcastro @ 2004/04/14

hmm. looks like hardocp clocked their server procs to 4ghz again.

(not working)

Comment from jmke @ 2004/04/14

3DM03 score effect can also be seen in Halo and Farcry, or any other bench/game which uses shaders and DX9 "stuff"

Comment from Sarcastro @ 2004/04/14

I sure hope the 2003 score is a true score and not the lovechild nv40 & a driver "optimalization".

Comment from 187(V)URD@ @ 2004/04/14

Nice performance but it sucks that i need to buy a new power supply

.

I just gonna wait till the reviews of the r420 (and power consumption) and wait a while till the prices drop a bit.

I can play every game with my GF4ti4200 , maybe some games on low but hey you don't see me care

Comment from SilverSpeed @ 2004/04/14

Error screen

The NV40 in ur AGP slot recuires to much power

I ( the powerbox ) can't deliver that kinda power

please ugrade ur pc haha

Comment from jmke @ 2004/04/14

you are semi correct.

if you don't enable any goodies (FSAA / AF) then sure, the 9800XT still kicks *** in 1024x768x32bit.

but then let's up the anty, enable those IQ settings with recent games (Halo/FarCry) and you'll see a nice rift starting to appear and the NV40 pulling away.

FarcCry;

Quote:

As was the case at 1024*768 with the eye-candy disabled, turning on FSAA and AF fails to differentiate the performance of these cards from one another. For those who want to look closely, you'll see that the GeForce 6800 Ultra does have the edge over the other cards here.

Cranking the resolution up to 1280*1024 with these enahnced image quality settings enabled, we see the GeForce 6800 Ultra pull away from the pack. More often than not, the new NVIDIA flagship card is 20fps or more ahead of the competition. Looking at the average framerate though, we realize that even the power of the GeForce 6800 Ultra is not enough to make gameplay in this demanding engine fluid at these incredibly high settings.

ps: what IQ probs do you have in FC then? didn't read anything about that.

the PSU demands are crazy. just plain crazy.

OCZ's 600Watt PSU doesn't look that over-the-top now does it?

Overclocking? sure

Quote:

To test overclocking performance and check if NV40 responds better to core or memory frequency increases, or whether a balanced approach to clocks is best (you can run in to memory bandwidth starvation at some core frequencies, depending on the power of the accelerator), 3DMark03 was chosen.

The 50MHz core increase (12.5%) adds another 400 or so points to the base score while the 9% increase in memory bandwidth offers more conservative performance increases. The maximum stable clock of the sample in 3DMark03 was 460/1250, returning a score just over 13000 3DMark03 marks.

It seems NV40 scales decently with core increases, here's hoping GDD3 frequencies can keep up.

I'd like to see a website try to run the NV40 on a 300Watt powered system and see what happens.

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