NVIDIA Launches Screaming GeForce 6 Series

NVIDIA introduced NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GPUs for high-performance desktop computers. The NVIDIA GeForce 6 Series, which includes the flagship GeForce 6800 Ultra and GeForce 6800, is designed to deliver a new 16-pipe superscalar architecture that delivers more than twice that of current NVIDIA GPUs, new features that bring you ultra-realistic cinematic effects, and an on-chip video-processing engine for high-definition video and DVD playback.

The 3-D graphics architecture of the GeForce 6800 GPUs introduces new technologies that will drive high image quality and performance in 3-D gaming. With its new superscalar architecture and GDDR3 memory, GeForce 6800 GPUs offer a staggering amount of graphics horsepower. Gaming performance is supercharged with eight times the floating-point shader power, four times the shadow-processing power and double the vertex processing power over the previous-generation GeForce FX architecture.

Built with full Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 support, the GeForce 6 Series was built to deliver ultra-realistic next-generation DirectX 9 titles. The GeForce 6800 GPUs give developers unlimited programmability, 32-bit shader precision, displacement mapping, geometry instancing, and other features unique to the GeForce 6 Series. In addition, this new GPU delivers full floating-point support throughout the entire pipeline, so GeForce 6800 GPUs vastly improve the quality of images in motion with floating point filtering. The new rotated-grid antialiasing feature removes jagged edges for incredible image quality and a new 16x anisotropic filtering mode adds clarity to textures.

GeForce 6800 GPUs have a programmable video-processing engine that delivers high-definition video playback. Featuring support for MPEG encode and decode, as well as support for Windows Media Video 9 (WMV9), the GeForce 6800 delivers an amazing video experience when used with the Windows Media Center Edition OS. The GeForce 6800 also enables high-quality video playback on any window size and has an integrated TV-encoder for direct-to-TV playback.

The first GPUs based on the NVIDIA GeForce 6 Series, the GeForce 6800 Ultra and GeForce 6800 models, are currently shipping to leading add-in-card partners, OEMs, system builders, and game developers. Retail graphics boards based on the GeForce 6800 models are slated for release in the next 45 days.