Page 4 - More Technology
Compared to the previous generation GPU the 6800 has up to eight times more floating point shader power and twice the vertex shading performance over that same NV30 series. That's a quite daring statement that NVIDIA made, we'll have to take a look at it soon though ;)
Performance increases over the previous generation:
- 4-8x floating-point shader power
- 4x shadow processing power
- 4x occlusion culling efficiency
- 2x vertex processing power
- ~2x frame buffer bandwidth
There are 6 vertex units inside this core. One of the biggest advantages of the Series 6 is of course the increased number of pixel pipelines. The more, the faster is the generic consensus here. Let me explain briefly, each pixel that is rendered on your screen goes through a pipe where it'll receive its complex color/effect etc. Each time that pixel is altered it'll pass through the pixel pipeline, one pass is one clock cycle. You can imagine going from 8 towards 16 pipes can bring you a dramatic performance increase. I have to note here that these are not theoretical pipelines as rumored by some websites prior to the product announcements. They are scalable though, each pipe is available at any time in sets of 4. Where NV35 was stereotyped as 4x2 / 8x0 architecture, the NV40 is 16x1 / 32x0.
480 Watt Power Supply RecommendedNow it's time to scare you a little. For GeForce 6800-based graphics cards, NVIDIA recommended we reviewers use a power supply with a rating of 480W or higher. GeForce 6800 Ultra boards will have two standard disk drive power plugs on the back end of the card. You must attach two independent (not shared or split with a y-cable) hard disk drive power dongles from the systems power supply to these plugs.
Now before you go on and storm off mad towards NVIDIA, this was coming a long time ago already; in fact I rememebr 3dfx years ago with an external power-supply. Technology these days require more and more power and well, 222 million transistors need some juice alright. Example; the Prescott processor alone can use 90-100 watts all by itself, throw in some fast memory and some optical devices and yeah, you need a sturdy PSU with this card. It really does not surprise me.
We however took it to the test with a way weaker PSU and things really are not that bad. We used a standard 350 Watt PSU together with a Pentium4 2.8 GHz, 1 GB test rig along with a DVD-Drive. The GeForce 6800 Ultra never crashed once ...
