Slashdot Mirror
Nvidia 6600 Series Examined
DrunkenTerror writes "Yesterday at QuakeCon, Nvidia debuted their new affordable GPU mentioned a few days ago on Slashdot. Dubbed the GeForce 6600 and 6600 GT, they differ from their higher-end brethren by having only 8 pixel pipes (unlike the 12 & 16 of the 6800 line), and appear to be limited to 128MB of RAM. Both GPUs support Shader Model 3.0. The 6600 GT sports fast GDDR3 RAM, while the 6600 appears to use plain-jane DDR. The GT also supports the oft-recently-discussed SLI, which could 'enable millions of users to experience the power of two GPUs in their system.' The best part, however, may be the price/performance. With a suggested street price of US$199, the 6600 GT runs at a steady 42 FPS in Doom 3, at high-quality 1600*1200." Reader aceh0 adds a few links: "Nvidia is announcing their NV4x Sub $200 Level graphics hardware today with the GeForce 6600 Series. The 6600 Series is feature complete with the 6800s and the differences come in the number of pipelines and memory configuration. SLI has trickled down to the 6600GT as well. Coverage is available at Neoseeker, Tech Report and PC Perspective as well as other sites."
http://www.finclockers.com/uutiskuvat/GeForce6600. pdf
Just in case anyone wants to check it out.
TruePunk | Games
Great. We've got a dozen different hardware sites reciting press releases, specifications and mfgr's performance promises, all the while speculating about what the hardware may be capable of. Until somebody can actually say "I've been playing with one of these and they're pretty nifty", we might as well just have links point to pressrealease.nvidia.com.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
This is going to be a very interesting comparison when the 6600 series comes out. Up until now, one could assume, at least in part, that a lot of the performance gains in the new NVidia 68xx series of hardware comes from the additional pipelines. I'd like very much to see how the 6600 series stack up against their older 8-pipeline brethren and ATI's 8-pipeline cards, such as the Radeon 97xx/98xx models.
Never look down your nose at others. Someday, someone is bound to see your boogers.
Which games are you specifically referring to, I'm 90% sure that people buying these 'now' are primarily looking for gaming rigs for Doom3 (heh as am I :)) and that from the reviews is heavily dependant on GPU performance
I'm running Linux with the latest nvidia-kernel with a Geforce 4ti. Since this is by nvidia, could I just swap out my cards for the 6600 and keep going on my merry way? Or should I wait for new drivers to come out?
Just wondering...
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Apple has a special version of the 6800 called the Dual Dual Link that can be doubled up to stack two of their new 30 inch monitors. In total this would give you 8.2 million pixels.
A ppleStore.woa/71801/wo/Xh3MfiiL68pu26PtlpU8CzA3csU /0.0.9.1.0.6.21.1.2.1.3.0.0.1.0
Does anyone know if this $600 card will work on Windows?
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Not to take points away from the article, but if you're looking to get a graphics card, take a peek at Nvidia's 6800 GT.
s .html
16 pipelines AND it can *easily* be overclocked from it's 350Mhz core / 1000 Mhz memory to the 425/1100 speeds of a 6800 Ultra (which is $150 more).
Compare benchmarks: http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_doom3_benchmark
ATI's X800 Pro has 12 pipelines.
I dunno, if you're gonna spend money on a graphics card, might as well go balls-out with this one. Best deal I've seen on a card in quite some time.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
I guess by Christmas Nvidia will have released the Nforce4 chipset, which supports PCI Express. So, if you were to purchase a socket 939 AMD64 chip and one of these new boards, not only would you have a single PCI Express slot, but you'd have two! The new Nvidia chipset being worked on supposedly supports 2 slots for SLI gaming, which would be cool if I could afford it. I would think you'd need a 600 watt power supply or something though. And don't quote me on the Christmas thing, I had just read somewhere that by the holidays Nvidia planned on having that chipset for sale. Who knows when it will actually happen.
I've seen benchmarks showing that ATI boards fare better in DOOM 3 with a faster CPU....but the NV solutions don't.
Go Figure.
-=Mongr=-
And I'll bet they cost pennies less to make than the higher-end chips. Translation: the higher-end chips should cost pennies -- not hundreds of $$$s -- more to buy.
Think about it. How much has it cost Nvidia to engineer this new chip? Either it is a crippled version of their existing chip, or they had to re-engineer it, make new masks, and setup a new, qualified production line at quite high costs.
Wouldn't we -- and they -- have been better off if they just punched out larger quanitites of the higher-end chips at less cost?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
My PC is an Athlon XP 2500+ with two optical drives, two hard drives, and a GF4Ti4200. It runs fine on a 350W power supply. I have a 450 now, just to be safe, but a system with a couple disks, a couple optical drives, a couple video cards and an opteron processor (more power-efficient than an Athlon XP) should be able to do fine with a 500W if not a 450.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You should still notice a pretty good difference. Most games store the really bandwidth intensive stuff (textures, vertex arrays) on the video card, and then just run the commands over the bus to display those. The only problem you really run into is when you don't have enough onboard memory on the card and have to move data from main memory to the card. However, most games are optimized to try and avoid that situation.
Reserved Word.
I've been told that you really can't discern any difference above 60 fps. In my experience playing games, things seem choppy and I seem to start dying more when my framerates drop below 45, so that may be about right. The other interesting part of the trivia was the claim that it is an American case. Our eyes are used to lights running at 60 Hz, which is why some visitors countries running on 50 Hz may think the lights flicker constantly for the first couple of days. Of course, I've never done any testing or further research on this.
Ahem. I believe you meant "nVidia dethroned 3dfx". I don't recall ATI being a major player until fairly recently. Yup, my bad. Actually, "nVidia ate 3dfx for breakfast" would be more accurate ;) I remember how much stir the TNT line created when first presented.