Introducing the GeForce 6800 Ultra. Contrary to the original plans, the AGP versions of the card, which will be launched first, will carry a dual-slot cooling solution.

A quick look at the technical specifications of the GeForce 6800 Ultra, codenamed NV40, will make the heart of any gamer go a-flutter: 222 million transistors, 16 "real" pixel pipelines in a superscalar design, full performance when using 32 Bit floating point precision, pixel and vertex shaders 3.0, 6 vertex shader units (600 million polys/s), an integrated video processor that supports MPEG encoding and decoding in hardware, GDDR 3 memory offering a bandwidth of 35,2 GB/s, rotated grid anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering up to 16x, on-demand real trilinear filtering - and these are just the bare essentials that only even begin to describe the chip.

NVIDIA promises the following compared to NV35/38:

• 4-8x floating-point shader power
• 4x shadow processing power
• 4x occlusion culling efficiency
• 2x vertex processing power
• ~2x frame buffer bandwidth

And if you think that some NVIDIA PR-representative conjured these numbers out of thin air, wait for the benchmarks further along in the article. Let's just say the numbers we see there are very convincing.