NVIDIA® GeForce™ 6800 GT PCI Express
 

NVIDIA’s mantra last year for their GeForce FX chips was the depth of their GPUs’ pipelines, eschewing a wide architecture for a narrow (think four pixel pipelines) yet deep one. With the announcement of the NV40 architecture this spring, NVIDIA revealed a dramatic change in its approach with the GeForce 6800 series, new GPUs that boast up to four times the number of pixel pipelines as their predecessors. In addition to this wider architecture, NV40 also incorporates hardware support for such cutting-edge features as DirectX 9.0c’s Shader Model 3.0 and floating point blending. NVIDIA traveled a somewhat rocky road last year, so has this design change paid off for them? In a word: yes. The high-end chip of the new GeForce 6 series, the 6800 Ultra, is roughly twice as fast as the company’s best GPU from last year, bringing NVIDIA back to a very strong position with the market from both a performance and technology perspective.

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