X-bit labs

Sources Confirm Albatron First-to-Market with GeForce 6800 Ultra.

Category: Video

by Anton Shilov

[ 05/09/2004 | 03:20 PM ]

Japanese stores confirmed recently that Albatron may be the first-to-market with its Trinity GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics cards. The information published by Akiba PC Hotline claims that the first batch of such products is anticipated to arrive in the middle of the month – days from now.

An Albatron’s spokesman lately told that the company’s latest graphics cards, the GeForce 6800 and the GeForce 6800UV, will hit the shelves in Taiwan in early May, a lot earlier than NVIDIA said on the launch day of its NV40 graphics processor. Even though there are no reports about such products availability today, there is information that the add-in graphics cards are expected to arrive in days from now. Officially NVIDIA promised that its partners would deliver the GeForce 6800 Ultra-based products in late May or early June.

The GeForce 6-series of graphics processors will be available across entry-level, mainstream, performance-mainstream, high-end and, apparently, so-called ultra high-end graphics cards. The new series of NVIDIA’s graphics processors is the company’s second generation lineup of DirectX 9.0-compatible offerings that greatly leverage the feature-set of NVIDIA GeForce FX graphics chips and brings important additional caps like Shader Model 3.0 as well as great performance improvements over the previous generation hardware.

So far NVIDIA has unveiled only a $499 offering called the GeForce 6800 Ultra that is based on a 400MHz chip that integrates 16-pixel pipelines, 6 vertex pipelines as well as equipped with 256MB of GDDR3 memory at 1100MHz. Later graphics cards powered by similar graphics processors priced at $399 and $299 will be introduced.

The price the first customers will have to pay for the GeForce 6800 Ultra in Japanese stores is said to be very high even for the country, where prices are typically higher compared to the USA and the EU. The debutant will retail for $623, which is $124 higher than official pricing by NVIDIA. The initial GeForce 5800 Ultra-based graphics cards were quoted at $498-$542, which was also more than $100 higher than recommended cost. By contrast, the GeForce 5900 Ultra-powered graphics cards entered the market at $492-$595 price-points amid officially recommended pricing of $499. Even though recommendations are effective only for the USA, there are no huge differences between them and pricing in the rest of the world.