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The New Nvidia 6800 Ultra DDL Graphics Card

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the what-does-it-mean-man dept.

Dr. q00p writes "Since Apple doesn't offer much information on the new Nvidia 6800 Ultra DDL graphics card (and NVIDIA even less) which is required to drive the new 30-inch Cinema HD Display the readers of Slashdot might be interested to read a reply from Ujesh Desai, Nvidia's General Manager of Desktop GPUs, to a series of questions from Accelerate Your Mac."

4 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. Tom's Hardware by pajamacore · · Score: 4, Informative

    There was actually a really great, informative article about the 6800 on Tom's Hardware a few weeks ago.

    "NVIDIA has seemingly pulled out all stops in an attempt to deliver cutting edge graphics with its GeForce 6800 Ultra. After gamers for too long have had to be content with mere incremental improvements to graphics performance, NVIDIA new card delivers a performance jump not seen for a long time. The device is also solidly engineered as well as insanely fast."

  2. Re:It's costs... by Quobobo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Argh. No, it's not. There's 2 (two) dual-link DVI ports, each of which can drive 1 (one) 30 inch monitor. Take a look at the pictures from WWDC where they had a G5 driving two of those monitors.

  3. Re:Mac user's number 1 hardware question by Synesthesiatic · · Score: 4, Informative
    A Mac-specific ROM is required for full Open Firmware support. Apparently a card will work without an OF ROM but won't be plug and play. That's pretty important for a Macintosh.

    Since Sun uses OF as well, I wonder if the same card could be used for Macs and Sun workstations.

  4. Seems to be a lot of confusion over dual-link DVI by shawnce · · Score: 4, Informative

    The 30" monitors from Apple have a resolution that cannot be fed by a single-link DVI connection. So they use dual-link DVI. Both single-link and dual-link are part of the DVI 1.0 standard, nothing Apple specific about them.

    The difference between single-link and dual-link is how many of the pins in the connector is used for transmitting data, in a nut shell 12 pins for the former and 24 pins for the later.

    Apple is using DVI-D (digital only) DVI connectors with a dual-link pin out for the 30" display. So one dual-link DVI-D connection is capable of driving one 30" display. The 6800 adapter used for these displays provides two dual-link DVI-D outputs, so one adapter can drive two 30" displays.

    As a reference...

    DVI connector type summary
    DVI 1.0 specification (PDF)