NVidia's new card set to trump ATI
Firm's 6800 graphics processor to reclaim high ground from rival
NVidia is set to reclaim the high ground in the graphics card war with ATI as products using its new 6800 processor hit the streets in the coming weeks.
The 6800 cards, the first to be based on the NV40 graphics chip, should help nVidia put a disappointing and controversial 2003 behind it.
Last year's products based on the NV30 processor failed to hit the performance highs the company needed to challenge ATI at the top, and were also accused of being too noisy.
PNY Technologies is one of the first vendors out of the blocks, announcing its Verto GeForce 6800 GT processor. The chip boasts 222 million transistors and 16 full pixel pipelines, twice the number used in other nVidia cards.
Early reviews indicate that the 6800 is the fastest card on the market.
Compared with cards based on the NV35/38 graphics processors, the NV40 chipset offers eight times the floating-point shader power, four times the shadow processing power and twice the frame buffer bandwidth.
It also comes with integrated MPEG encoding and decoding, while offering full support for Microsoft's DirectX 9.0 and Shader Model 3.0, for recreating cinematic effects.
"The Verto GeForce 6800GT will be targeted towards the e-tail market to start with, rather than the retail arena," said PNY general manager Vicky Burgoyne.
"This is really a card for performance users, gamers and enthusiasts, for whom price is not an issue. The allocation of chips is tight now, but it should be okay in July when we expect to ship the card."
Others in the channel are also seeing constrained supply. Peter Stern, sales director at Realtime Distribution, said: "I know the nVidia 6800s are supposedly arriving now, but we are finding that you can't sell vapourware.
There is massive demand for the cards (both the GT and Ultra versions), but there are minimal stocks at the moment. We've been told that things will free up in July."