The NVIDIA 6800 Ultra is a new advanced video card, which has cardinal differences from elder units. It proves the highest growth of performance and shows the best results in some professional tests.
A code name of this chip is NV40. NVIDIA uses the 130 nm FSG (IBM) technology for its production. The chip includes two hundred and twenty two million transistors in a FC case (a flip chip, an upturned chip without a metal case). The NVIDIA 6800 Ultra has a 256bit memory interface and up to 1 GB DDR/GDDR-2/GDDR-3 memory and works with an AGP 3.0 8x bus interface. There is also an opportunity for a special mode AGP 16x (double side), as well as a modification for a PCI-Express HSI bridge.
The video card contains sixteen pixel conveyors with one texture block for each one. There is an opportunity for an arbitrary filtering of integers and floating textures, which is achieved with the anisotropic filtering up to 16x. There are six top conveyors with one texture block for each without filtering of selected values. Here, the GeForce uses a discrete access method.
The NVIDIA 6800 Ultra has a possibility of calculating, blending and recording up to sixteen full pixels per tact. A full pixel stores the color, depth and buffer of templates. The video card has an ability of calculating and recording up to the 32 depth and templates' buffer values per tact. This feature is on if the processor does not perform any operations with the color. There is also a support of a double-side buffer of templates.
Advanced features of the GeForce go 6800 Ultra are a support of special optimizations of the geometry re-drawing and accelerating of shadows algorithms on the base of templates' buffer. This is the so called technology Ultra Shadow 2 that provides everything what is needed for the support of the pixel and top conveyors version 3.0, including dynamic branches in pixel and top processors, a choice of the texture values from top processors , etc.
The NVIDIA 6800 Ultra supports a cadre buffer in a float format (comprising blending operations) and a MRT technology (Multiple Render Targets). The video card works with the interfaces 2x RAMDAC 400 MHz, 2x DVI interface (requires external chips) and TV-Out and TV-In interfaces (requires external chips as well).
The system is presented with a programmed streaming video processor. It can be in use for compression, decompression and video post-processing tasks solving. There is also a 2D accelerator with the support of all GDI+ functions. The following specifications for the reference card NVIDIA 6800 Ultra contain: a kernel clock 400 MHz; an efficient memory clock 1.1 GHz (2*550 MHz); a memory GDDR3; a memory volume 256 MB; a memory capacity 35.2 GB per second.
The video card supplies up to 120 Wt of energy. There are two cutoff points for an additional power supply on the video card. Hence, it is recommended to install it on a PC with the end power 480 Wt and higher.
In the conclusion, the NVIDIA 6800 Ultra is built on a chip with new architectural approaches implemented. That is the reason why it supports different advanced functions, which are increasing its performance to very high standards.