When NVIDIA updates their product line, the GPUs usually arrive in the form of a value, midstream, and high-end variety, thus catering to all budgets or tastes. Monetarily speaking, it works out for the most part with those in need of a simple upgrade able to get something on the cheap, while Uber-users can get a new card to brag to their friends about, both performance and price-wise. It's been like this for quite a while, at least since the days of the GeForce 4 Ti4600/4400/4200.
In this year's offerings from NVIDIA, there are three cards, the GeForce 6800, 6800 GT, and 6800 Ultra (and even a fourth if you count the 6800 Ultra Extreme). They're all based on the same relative architecture, the NV40, and anyone of these cards is sure to give your system a large boost in performance. Major differences between the current GeForce 6 series of cards include the 12 pipelines on the standard GeForce 6800, instead of the 16 found on the other cards, and speed increases for the GPU and RAM for each subsequent version. Our focus today will be on the 6800 GT from BFG Technologies.
Some of BFG's current crop of cards ship in a pre-overclocked state hence the card being named the BFG GeForce 6800 GT OC. It gives the user an extra boost in the GPU speed, putting it slightly ahead of the competition. As always, the card comes with BFG's lifetime warranty, allaying any fears about premature breakdown due to the higher clock speed. Let's look at the specifications of the GeForce 6 series, and the BFG 6800 GT OC in particular and see what makes this card a major contender.
NOTE: We did not receive a retail box for review
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| Specifications & Features of the BFG GeForce 6800 GT OC |
| Not Just a GT, Not Quite an Ultra |
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CINEFX 3.0 SHADING ARCHITECTURE
- Vertex Shaders
Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader 3.0
Displacement mapping
Vertex frequency stream divider
Infinite length vertex programs*
- Pixel Shaders
Support for DirectX 9.0 Pixel Shader 3.0
Full pixel branching support
Support for Multiple Render Targets (MRTs)
Infinite length pixel programs*
- Next-Generation Texture Engine
Up to 16 textures per rendering pass
Support for 16-bit floating point format and 32-bit floating point format
Support for non-power of two textures
Support for sRGB texture format for gamma textures
DirectX and S3TC texture compression
- Full 128-bit studio-quality floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline with native hardware support for 32bpp, 64bpp, and 128bpp rendering modes
NVIDIA HIGH-PRECISION DYNAMIC-RANGE (HPDR) TECHNOLOGY
- Full floating point support throughout entire pipeline
- Floating point filtering improves the quality of images in motion
- Floating point texturing drives new levels of clarity and image detail
- Floating point frame buffer blending gives detail to special effects like motion blur and explosions
- New rotated-grid anti-aliasing removes jagged edges for incredible edge quality
INTELLISAMPLE 3.0 TECHNOLOGY
- Advanced 16x anisotropic filtering
- Blistering-fast anti-aliasing and compression performance
- Support for advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data at even higher resolutions and frame rates
- Fast z-clear
- High-resolution compression technology (HCT) increases performance at higher resolutions through advances in compression technology
ADVANCED ENGINEERING
- Over 220m transistors
- Designed for PCI Express x16
- Supports PCI Express high-speed interconnect (HSI) technology for bidirectional interconnect protocol conversion
- Full support of AGP 8X including Fast Writes and sideband addressing
- Support for the industry's fastest GDDR3 memory
- 256-bit advanced memory interface
- 0.13 micron process technology
- Advanced thermal management and thermal monitoring
- 40 mmx40 mm, BGA flip-chip package
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ULTRASHADOW II TECHNOLOGY
- Designed to enhance the performance of shadow-intensive games, like id Software's Doom III
ADVANCED VIDEO AND DISPLAY FUNCTIONALITY
- Dedicated on-chip video processor
- MPEG video encode and decode
- WMV9 decode acceleration
- Advanced adaptive de-interlacing
- High-quality video scaling and filtering
- Integrated NTSC/PAL TV encoder supporting resolutions up to 1024x768 without the need for panning with built-in Macrovision copy protection
- DVD and HDTV-ready MPEG-2 decoding up to 1920x1080i resolutions
- Dual integrated 400 MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz.
- Dual DVO ports for interfacing to external TMDS transmitters and external TV encoders
- Microsoft Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window
- VIP 1.1 interface support for video-in function
- Full NVIDIA nView multi-display technology capability
NVIDIA DIGITAL VIBRANCE CONTROL (DVC) 3.0
- DVC color controls
- DVC image sharpening controls
OPERATING SYSTEMS
- Windows XP
- Windows ME
- Windows 2000
- Windows 9X
- Macintosh OS, including OS X
- Linux
API SUPPORT
- Complete DirectX support, including the latest version of Microsoft DirectX 9.0
- Full OpenGL, including OpenGL 1.5
* The operating system or APIs can impose limits, but the hardware does not limit shader program length.
BFG GEFORCE 6800 GT OC
- 370 MHz Core Clock (vs. 350MHz Standard)
- 500 MHz Core Clock (1000 MHz Effective)
- 256 MB GDDR3 Memory
- Dual 400 MHz RAMDACs
- 555 million vertices/sec setup
- 32.0GB/second memory bandwidth
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As with most of BFG's bundles, there isn't much in the box other than the card itself and a few accessories. There's little, if any, filler, focusing only on what's needed to get the card running. That leaves us with a Quick Install manual (with a more comprehensive version in PDF format on the driver CD), a CD with ForceWare 61.21 drivers, 3D Demos, and nVDVD software. There is also an additional game CD with demo versions of Splinter Cell - Pandora Tomorrow, Silent Storm, and Painkiller, and finally a DVI-to-VGA connector and Power cable splitter. Although we tend to lean towards adding a bit more to the package, keeping out the filler helps keep costs under control, and generally people won't need all of the cables and other stuff found with other manufacturer's bundles.
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