Date:
Monday , November 07, 2005
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS Preview

NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 GS takes aim at ATI’s recently launched, but yet to be sold, ATI Radeon X1600 XT. We evaluate the gaming experience NVIDIA’s new mainstream performance GPU provides in today’s top four hottest selling games.

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System Test Setup:

CPU

AMD Athlon 64 3500+

Motherboard

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe

System Memory

2 x 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LLPro

Hard Drive

Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150

OS

Windows XP Pro SP2 with DirectX 9.0c

For our system platform setup, we are using the nForce4-based ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard and an AMD Athlon 64 3500+.

Video Cards:

Make & Model

Platform

Core Clock

Memory Clock

Driver Version

Notes

GeForce 6800 GS 256MB Single and SLI

PCIe

425MHz

1.0GHz

Beta ForceWare 81.87

Non WHQL

ATI Radeon X1600 XT 256MB

PCIe

590MHz

1.38GHz

Beta Catalyst 8.183

Non WHQL

Article Image

Game and Video Card Evaluation Setup

For our video card comparison, we are taking the GeForce 6800 GS and pitting it against the Radeon X1600 XT. We are using a beta version of ForceWare 81.87 provided by NVIDIA, which adds INF support for the GeForce 6800 GS. It is the same driver in terms of features and performance as the 81.87s, which are posted on NZone. With the ATI Radeon X1600 XT, we are using the latest beta 8.183 drivers as provided by ATI, which include the OpenGL fix.

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world game play that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate.