[H]ard|OCP reviews Nvidia's GeForce 6800 GS.
Competition is a great word. One of the definitions of competition is as follows: ?Rivalry between two or more businesses striving for the same customer or market.? This sums up the situation we are presented with today. NVIDIA is focusing on the ?Performance Mainstream? market ? cards in the US $249 price range ? and they are striving to provide a better product than the competition.
This class of hardware is mainstream, but with a performance edge. Think of these cards as your ?Enthusiasts? of the mainstream price segment. (Does anyone remember the Ti4200? Could we be that lucky again?)
Over a month ago, ATI announced their new product offering at $249, the Radeon X1600 XT. You can read all about it here, and find out how what sort of gaming experience it provides. The day the X1600 XT was (paper) launched, its immediate competition was the ?vanilla? NVIDIA GeForce 6800. Looking back at our game play evaluation, the GeForce 6800 seemed to keep up very well with ATI?s new Radeon X1600 XT. In some games, the 6800 provided a better gaming experience than the Radeon X1600 XT; in other games, the cards were dead even.
The GeForce 6800 seemed to be a good match with the Radeon X1600 XT and it seemed that NVIDIA really didn?t have to do anything special to compete with it. Apparently, NVIDIA doesn?t just want to break even; they want to blow the the X1600 XT out of the water. To do this, they have created a brand new GPU called the GeForce 6800 GS to compete directly with the Radeon X1600 XT at $249...
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