Date:
Thursday , August 12, 2004
Author:
Brent Justice
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NVIDIA GeForce 6600 Preview

Today NVIDIA unveils a brand new GeForce 6 series GPU that is aimed directly at the mainstream market. Inside we give a brief preview of what NVIDIA is bringing to the table.

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Wrapping it Up:

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To re-cap, NVIDIA is introducing two new mainstream video cards based on the same technology used in the GeForce 6800 series. The 6600GT will use GDDR3 while the 6600 will use DDR1 and both differ greatly in clock speeds. The importance of this product cycle is that NVIDIA is scaling down their whole new generational architecture into the mainstream market instead of just re-labeling previous generations.

NVIDIA is claming some very high playable performance levels for the GeForce 6600GT in DOOM 3, either High Quality 1024x768 with 4XAA and 8XAF or High Quality at 1600x1200. It will be extremely impressive if they can pull this off. Rest assured when we get our samples we will definitely be testing that out.

We are very excited to see the inclusion of SLI support on the GeForce 6600GT. This kind of technology has the potential to greatly benefit the gamer. We are happy to see SLI support moved into the mainstream.

Since these cards are in the mainstream the prices are set accordingly. The GeForce 6600GT will go for $199 MSRP and the GeForce 6600 is set at $179 MSRP. Availability on these will be towards the end of September for retail and e-tail in PCI-Express format with AGP to come later.

Armed with its latest architecture, NVIDIA’s latest product launch is positioning itself to cover a wide range of price segments while targeting the enthusiast, performance and mainstream markets. It is good to see these features made available to the mainstream user at an affordable price point.

While all this sounds good on paper we won’t truly know what kind of gaming experience these cards will provide until we have them in hand and are able to run them through the gauntlet of gaming.