[H]ard|OCP reviews Nvidia's GeForce 6600 GT.
At the very high-end enthusiast level we have the NVIDIA GeForce 6800Ultra competing with the ATI Radeon X800XT-PE. Both have a suggested retail price of $499, which is no small amount of change indeed. There have however been concerns lately about Radeon X800XT-PE availability in the retail channels, as products have been hard to find. While the GeForce 6800Ultra has a better chance of being found, its availability is far from meeting demand. Moving down a step we find that both ATI and NVIDIA offer a video card at the $399 price point. NVIDIA has the GeForce 6800GT and ATI has the Radeon X800Pro, both which are competing very well, almost neck and neck in the latest games (except DOOM 3 where the NVIDIA takes a commanding lead), and are much more available than the highest-end video cards.
When we hit the next two price points down the line we find something interesting. ATI has no "new" competition for NVIDIA! NVIDIA has a GeForce 6800 which is based on the NV40 (GeForce 6800) architecture sporting all the features of the 6800GT and Ultra only with reduced performance at a suggested retail price of $299, making it much more affordable for consumers. When we go to look at ATI?s side we find absolutely nothing based on the R420 (X800) architecture priced at $299. No ATI video card occupies this space with "next gen" technology currently.
When we move down to the $199 price level, which is considered the top-end mainstream price point, the situation gets even worse for ATI. You see, on August 12th NVIDIA announced a new product lineup that fills the mainstream price points and is based on all the technology that is in the NV40 (GeForce 6800 series). The actual core code name is NV43, which is being fabbed at TSMC at .11 nanometers, and does contain every single 3D feature the GeForce 6800 series has such as Shader Model 3.0 support, Internal 128-bit (FP32) floating point precision, 64-bit Floating Point texture filtering, framebuffer blending based on OpenEXR, Ultrashadow II, and more. The GeForce 6600GT is the $199 part and has 8 pixel-pipelines, 3 vertex engines and is using a 128-bit memory bus connected to GDDR3. The GeForce 6600 has everything the 6600GT has except it uses DDR1 and will be clocked lower on the core and memory. Both of these video cards are native PCI-Express and the 6600GT supports NVIDIA?s new SLI technology, but we will certainly see AGP inteface cards this year...
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