GeForce 6800 Ultra has 222 million transistors

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http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15268


Geforce 6800 Ultra has 222 million transistors

Sheesh kebab


By Fuad Abazovic: Saturday 10 April 2004, 11:26

NEXT WEEK is when Nvidia's hammer strikes the forge and NV40 sparks
fly.
We already know a fair amount of what Nvidia will reveal on the 13th
in San Francisco and on the 14th in the land of chocolate and cuckoos.

16×1 and 32×0 no Z values is what Nvidia wants to tell people and
12353 3D marks 03 for the chip that has an amazing 222 million
transistors.

As we said before Nvidia will push hard the fact that it is the only
firm that will have a Pixel Shader 3.0 model on the market and it will
focus its marketing efforts there. This means that apart from full
support for Shader Model 3.0 it will support model 3.0 Vertex Texture
Fetch/Long programs/Pixel Shader flow control Vertex Texture
Fetch/Long programs/Pixel Shader flow control and full speed fp32
shading. Let's hope everyone understands what this means.

There are plenty of other features of the chip which can do 16 pixels
per clock Color & Z or 32 pixels per clock Z-only, 64-bit FP Frame
Buffer Blending & Display, Lossless Color & Z-Compression and a new
Antialiasing approach called High Quality AA - Rotated Grid full MTR
(multi target rendering I guess), and accelerated shadow rendering.

The chip is built by IBM on a .13µ (micron) architecture and it will
use the 60 series of drivers - currently 60.70.

Geforce 6800 Ultra has two power connectors and is, surprisingly a one
slot card for its reference card.

It uses GDDR3 memory clocked at 550MHz but some partners might go even
higher.

Nvidia officially told me a few days back in London that we won't get
any samples from them since we are not a review site.

In fact, it likens us to The Sun, Britain's top newspaper. Except we
don't carry pictures of young ladies or footballers although we do
cover mobile phones. µ