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."

Comments

Time to get cracking on those pipes.

[LiberalApplication]

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)

...how long do you guys think it will it be before someone releases a driver mod/patch or hardware howto for unlocking the other pipelines? Or are they actually going to use chips that don't physically have them?

Re: PDF document

[blanks]

http://www.finclockers.com/uutiskuvat/GeForce6600. pdf Just in case anyone wants to check it out.

Is it the GPU, or is it the pipelines?

[L0neW0lf]

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.

You'd be better off w/ 6800 GT

[DroopyStonx]

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.

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_benchmarks .html

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.

Pennies Less

[Nom du Keyboard]

they differ from their higher-end brethren by having only 8 pixel pipes (unlike the 12 & 16 of the 6800 line)

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?