NVIDIA Plans Third GeForce 6800-class Graphics Card? [UPDATED]

NVIDIA to Broaden High-End Lineup with $399 Offering

by Anton Shilov
05/02/2004 | 04:06 PM

UPDATE: Correcting brand-names and specification of the performance-mainstream graphics offering.

NVIDIA Corporation is likely to broaden its lineup of high-end graphics processors with a new offering at $399 price-point in addition to already unveiled SKUs that cost $299 and $499. The broadening of product-line is likely to reshuffle the specs of graphics within the lineup, according to the information published by ComputerBase.de German web-site.

An article that cites a picture from NVIDIA’s presentation suggests that the company will have three following high-end graphics cards this Summer:

GeForce 6800 Ultra: 16 pixel pipelines; 6 vertex pipelines; 400MHz core clock-speed; 1100MHz memory clock-speed; 256MB GDDR3 memory.
GeForce 6800 GT: 16 pixel pipelines; 6 vertex pipelines; 350MHz core clock-speed; 1000MHz memory clock-speed; 256MB GDDR3 memory.
GeForce 6800: 12 pixel pipelines; 6 vertex pipelines; 325MHz core clock-speed; 700MHz memory clock-speed; 128MB DDR memory.

In case the information is correct and NVIDIA does not change its plans in future, the GeForce 6800 Ultra will retail for $499, the GeForce 6800 GT will cost $399 and the GeForce 6800 will quote for $299.

The GeForce 6-series of graphics processors will be available across entry-level, mainstream, performance-mainstream and 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 processors and brings important additional caps like Shader Model 3.0 as well as great performance improvements over the previous generation hardware.

Retail graphics cards based on the GeForce 6800 Ultra are slated for release in the May or early June. Graphics cards powered by the GeForce 6800 graphics processors are expected to emerge commercially in June. No timeframes are given for the GeForce 6800 GT offering.