Nvidia goes mainstream with the GeForce 6800

Today, graphics company Nvidia revealed the specifications for its standard GeForce 6800 graphics card. The GeForce 6800 joins the previously announced GeForce 6800 Ultra and 6800 GT editions. The new graphics card will offer all the features introduced in the 6 series architecture, including support for DirectX Shader Model 3.0.

The GeForce 6800 comes in at a $299 price point--with a 12-pixel pipe clocked at 325MHz and 128MB of memory clocked at 700MHz. The new card is a single-slot solution and requires a single-Molex power connector.

The pricier GeForce 6800 Ultra and GT cards both have 16-pixel pipe engines and feature 256MB of memory. The $399 single-slot GeForce 6800 GT has a 350MHz core clock and a 1GHz memory clock. The $499 Ultra edition has a faster, 400MHz core clock and memory clocked at 1.1GHz, but it also uses a double-height cooling unit that protrudes into an adjacent card slot.

While the standard GeForce 6800 only has 12-pixel pipes operational, the card still compares well against the 8-piped Radeon 9800XT, the best card from the previous graphics generation. In 3DMark03, the standard GeForce 6800 scored 9387 3DMarks in the default 1024x768 test on a 3.4Ghz Intel Pentium 4 Northwood platform with Nvidia's new 61.34 beta drivers. A 256MB Radeon 9800XT scored 6675 3DMarks on the same platform using the new Catalyst 4.6 driver set.

According to Nvidia, GeForce 6800 card manufacturers should begin shipments sometime next week. Currently, GeForce 6800 Ultra cards are only available to high-end system builders such as Alienware and FalconNW, but a handful of cards should be trickling into retail, and GeForce 6800 GT cards will start appearing late this month.