|  NVIDIA is poised to fire the first shot in the next battle of the war for 3D supremacy with today's official unveiling of their new NV40 GPU. The past two years have been especially hard fought. Both NVIDIA and ATI have been introducing new products every few months in their continuing effort to "one-up" the other in the eyes of influential enthusiasts, casual gamers, and budget conscious consumers looking for the best return on their investment. We've seen a myriad of new high-end, mid-range, and budget GPUs from NVIDIA and ATi, with each one designed to offer its own unique features and benefits at its specific price point. We saw the performance lead change hands between ATi and NVIDIA at the low and mid-range market segments a few times over the past couple of years, but ever since the introduction of the Radeon 9700 Pro back in August of 2002, ATi has held onto the top spot with a firm grasp in the sought after enthusiast segment. The R300, and the evolution of high-end "enthusiast-class" products based on its core technology, essentially remained one step ahead of NVIDIA's flagship NV3x products for all of 2003. | This put NVIDIA in the unfamiliar position of playing "catch-up", which did not sit well with their outspoken CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang. When asked about ATi's ability to snatch the performance crown from NVIDIA he responded with, "Tiger Woods doesn't win every day. We don't deny that ATI has a wonderful product and it took the performance lead from us. But if they think they're going to hold onto it, they're smoking something hallucinogenic.'' With what we know today, the confidence, and perhaps brashness, Jen-Hsun exuded with this statement seems to have stemmed from his knowledge of NVIDIA's next-gen GPU architecture, codenamed NV40. With the NV40, NVIDIA's goals were to dramatically improve performance and image quality, while adding support for the latest DirectX feature set. |
| The culmination of their efforts resulted in the new GeForce 6 Series of products powered by the NV40. The video card we'll be looking at today on HotHardware is NVIDIA's latest flagship product, the GeForce 6800 Ultra (yes, the FX moniker is gone). With the GeForce 6800 Ultra, NVIDIA strives to erase all of the NV3x's shortcomings, while emphatically building upon its strengths. The result is a product that doesn't simply outperform the previous generation - it destroys it... Specifications & Features of The GeForce 6800 Ultra
NVIDIA's Newest Flagship GPU CINEFX 3.0 SHADING ARCHITECTURE - Vertex Shaders
Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader 3.0
Displacement mapping
Vertex frequency stream divider
Infinite length vertex programs* - Pixel Shaders
Support for DirectX 9.0 Pixel Shader 3.0
Full pixel branching support
Support for Multiple Render Targets (MRTs)
Infinite length pixel programs* - Next-Generation Texture Engine
Up to 16 textures per rendering pass
Support for 16-bit floating point format and 32-bit floating point format
Support for non-power of two textures
Support for sRGB texture format for gamma textures
DirectX and S3TC texture compression - Full 128-bit studio-quality floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline with native hardware support for 32bpp, 64bpp, and 128bpp rendering modes
| | ADVANCED VIDEO AND DISPLAY FUNCTIONALITY - Dedicated on-chip video processor
- MPEG video encode and decode
- WMV9 decode acceleration
- Advanced adaptive de-interlacing
- High-quality video scaling and filtering
- Integrated NTSC/PAL TV encoder supporting resolutions up to 1024x768 without the need for panning with built-in Macrovision copy protection
- DVD and HDTV-ready MPEG-2 decoding up to 1920x1080i resolutions
- Dual integrated 400 MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz.
- Dual DVO ports for interfacing to external TMDS transmitters and external TV encoders
- Microsoft Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window
- VIP 1.1 interface support for video-in function
- Full NVIDIA nView multi-display technology capability
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