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Going first base with an XFX member
Let's talk swiftly about the graphics core of the the GeForce 6800 GS.
The GPU (graphics processor unit, the core) itself is build upon a 0.11 Micron fabrication process technology. Transistor talk then, the 6800 has a lot of transistors not as much as the new 7800 series have but still, it's impressive. There are 222 Million transistors. This is a 12 pipe version so part of that is inactive. Imagine all that on a 40mm x 40mm FlipChip GPU running 425+ MHz. Amazing. Since we are on the topic of the graphics core, inside it there are precisely five vertex units active. The number of pixel pipelines are identical to the 6800 model as there are twelve configured in 4 quads.
Today's card has been equipped with 256 MB of gDDR3 memory, also called framebuffer.
$ffffffffff ---------------------------------------------------The amount of memory that holds the entire bit-mapped image that is sent to the monitor. The frame buffer usually is stored in the memory chips on the video adapter. The video chip set can also be integrated into the motherboard design, and the frame buffer stored in the main memory.
What does "frame buffer" mean?
$ffffffffff Display adapter information
$ffffffffff ---------------------------------------------------
$0000000000 Description : NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS
$0000000001 Vendor ID : 10de (NVIDIA)
$0000000002 Device ID : 00c0
$0000000003 Location : bus 5, device 0, function 0
$0000000004 Bus type : PCIE
| What is MHz (Megahertz) ? |
$000000000f PCIE link width : 16x supported, 16x selected
$0000000009 Base address 0 : f2000000 (memory range)
$000000000a Base address 1 : e0000000 (memory range)
$000000000b Base address 2 : none
$000000000c Base address 3 : f3000000 (memory range)
$000000000d Base address 4 : none
$000000000e Base address 5 : none
$ffffffffff ---------------------------------------------------
$ffffffffff NVIDIA specific display adapter information
| What does "clock" frequency mean ? |
$ffffffffff ---------------------------------------------------
$0100000000 Graphics core : NV42 revision A1 (12x1,5vp)
$0100000001 Hardwired ID : 00c0 (ROM strapped to 00c0)
$0100000002 Memory bus : 0-bit
$0100000003 Memory type : DDR (RAM configuration 07)
$0100000004 Memory amount : 262144KB
$0100000005 Core clock : 11.322MHz
$0100000006 Memory clock : 548.438MHz (1096.875MHz effecti...
$0100000007 Reference clock : 27.000MHz
The LCD you are staring at for example has 1280x1024 dots, thus 1.3 million individual pixels that need a 32-bit or lower color. 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 12 pipes can bring you a nice performance increase. The Series 7 7800 GT(X) actually has 24 of them. They are scalable, each pipe is available at any time in sets of 4, which we call quads. Today's product as stated has 12 pixel pipelines running at a clock frequency of 485 MHz.
Refence Specs GeForce 6600 GeForce 6600 GT GeForce 6800 GeForce 6800 GS GeForce 6800 GT GeForce 6800 Ultra GeForce 7800 GT GeForce 7800 GTX Codename NV43 NV43 NV42 NV42 NV40GT NV40U G70 G70 Transistors ? ? 222 million 302 million 302 million Process, GPU maker 110nm 110nm 130nm 110nm 130nm 110nm 110nm Core clock 300 MHz 500 MHz Up to 400 MHz 425 350MHz 400MHz 400 MHz 430 MHz Memory 128MB DDR1 128MB GDDR3 128MB DDR1 128/256MB gDDR3 256MB GDDR3 Memory bus 128-bit 256-bit Memory clock Up to manufacturer 2x500 MHz 2 x 325MHz 2x
500MHz2 x 500MHz 2 x 600MHz 2 x 500MHz 2 x 600MHz PCB P212 P212 P2?? P210 P210 - Pipelines 8 8 12 16 16 20 24 FP operations FP16, FP32 DirectX DirectX 9.0c Pixel shaders Pixel Shaders 3.0 Vertex shaders Vertex Shaders 3.0 OpenGL 1.5+ (2.0) 2.0 Availability Now
So what are the major advantages of the Series 6 6800 products ? Well, feature wise we are looking pretty much at the same technology we have known for 14-15 months now. What you need to remember is that any Series 6 graphics card can achieve what a modern game expects from it. Obviously the keywords over the past couple of years has been "Shader technology." It really changed the way we look at games from a graphical point of view. It allows the game programmers to take games to a next level in both a visual and performance terms.
As always, that's the point where we land and quickly discuss on Shader model 3.
| So Hilbert, what is a shader ? |
| What do we need to render a three dimensional object; 2D on your monitor? We start off by building some sort of structure that has a surface, that surface is being built from triangles and why triangles? They are quick to calculate. How's each triangle being processed? Each triangle has to be transformed according to its relative position and orientation to the viewer. Each of the three vertices the triangle is made up of is transformed to its proper view space position. The next step is to light the triangle by taking the transformed vertices and applying a lighting calculation for every light defined in the scene. At last the triangle needs to be projected to the screen in order to rasterize it. During rasterization the triangle will be shaded and textured. |
