ATi Radeon X800 XT & X800 Pro - Heart Burn For The NV40

With only a couple of days notice, NVIDIA contacted us and asked us to take a look at two new derivatives of the GeForce 6800.  Pictured left here, is the GeForce 6800 Ultra "Extreme" and GeForce 6800GT.  The GF 6800 Extreme should be considered a "golden sample" type of card, with its GPU speed binned out to 450MHz, as opposed to the stock Ultra 400MHz core.  The GT card is also a 16 Pixel Pipeline based product, with slightly slower core and memory speeds at 350MHz/1GHz.  We should also point out that NVIDIA also sent in new drivers (version 61.11) for these two cards.  However, in the interest of time, we were only able to re-run our Wolfenstein ET and Far Cry benchmarks with these new drivers.  NVIDIA informed us that these two game engines, would be impacted most be the new driver set and other titles would see only small gains.  They also pointed out a "Z-Cull" bug in their old 60.72 drivers, that has been fixed in Far Cry and as such the new driver improves performance greatly in this game.  Unfortunately, with these new drivers, AA ended up being broken and we had to toss out our Far Cry numbers for the GT and Ultra Extreme cards.

The rest of our benchmarks were run with the 60.72 driver on the GeForce 6800 Ultra and the 61.11 drivers for the 6800 GT and 6800 Ultra Extreme cards, since that driver was required to run the newer cards.  All told, this last ditch effort was very reminiscent of the somewhat sneaky move Intel pulled last year with the introduction of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, during AMD's Athlon 64 launch.  We assume that there is certainly no coincidence with the "Extreme" branding on the high end 6800 Ultra model.