GeForce 6 Series
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The GeForce 6 Series (codenamed NV40) is Nvidia's sixth generation of GeForce graphics chipsets. All of them support Vertex and Pixel shader version 3.0, as required under the Microsoft DirectX 9.0c specification. They all also fully support OpenGL 2.0. Launched on April 14, 2004, the GeForce 6 family introduced several important new features to the GeForce product-line: PureVideo functionality, Shader Model 3.0 support, and SLI technology. But perhaps most importantly, the GeForce 6 family addressed the perceived shortcoming of its predecessor GeForce FX family, mediocre Shader Model 2.0 performance. Hence, on both technical and marketing terms, the GeForce 6 enabled Nvidia to return to a position of competitiveness against its rival, ATI Technologies. GeForce 6 Series featuresImage:Pny 6600GT.jpg
nVidia NV43 AGP (Geforce 6600GT)
SLIThe Scalable Link Interface (SLI) allows two GeForce 6 cards of the same type to be connected in tandem. The driver software balances the workload to the two chips dynamically. (Although SLI is also the acronym for the late 3dfx's Scan-Line Interleave scheme, Nvidia and 3dfx's SLI technologies are different in implementation.) SLI-capability is limited to select members of the GeForce 6 family: 6500 and above. SLI is only available on the PCI-Express platform. Nvidia PureVideo TechnologyNvidia PureVideo technology is the combination of a dedicated video processing core and software that delivers high-definition H.264, VC-1, WMV, and MPEG-2 movies with reduced CPU utilization and low power consumption. The subpixel processing enables videos to be scaled to any size at a potentially higher quality than some other software processing methods. Shader Model 3.0While ATI was the first to deliver Shader Model 2.0 capability to the retail market, Nvidia was the first to deliver Shader Model 3.0 (SM3) capability. SM3 extends SM2 in a number of ways: standard FP32 (32-bit floating-point) precision, dynamic branching, increased efficiency and longer shader lengths are the main additions. Shader Model 3.0 was quickly adopted by game developers because it was quite simple to convert existing shaders coded with SM 2.0/2.0A/2.0B to version 3.0, and it offered noticeable performance improvements across the entire GeForce 6 line. CaveatsThere are reports of incompatibility between GeForce 6 series cards and some wide aspect ratio LCD panels when connected through DVI[citation needed]. PureVideo functionality varies by model, with some models lacking WMV9 and/or H.264 acceleration[1]. In addition, motherboards with some VIA and SIS chipsets and an AMD Athlon XP processor seemingly have compatibility problems with the GeForce 6600 and 6800 GPUs. Problems that have been known to arise are freezing, artifacts, reboots, and other issues that make gaming and use of 3D applications almost impossible. These problems seem to happen only on Direct3D based applications and do not affect OpenGL[2]. Geforce 6 Series ComparisonHere is how the released versions of the "GeForce 6" series family compare to Nvidia's previous flagship GPU, the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, in addition to the competitive units of ATI's newly released for the time Radeon X800 and X850 Series:
GeForce FX series has an Array based Vertex Shader. GeForce 6800 SeriesThe first family in the GeForce 6 product-line, the 6800 series catered to the high-performance gaming market. As the very first GeForce 6 model, the 16 pixel pipeline GeForce 6800 Ultra (NV40) was 2 to 2.5 times faster than Nvidia's previous top-line product (the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra), packed four times the number of pixel pipelines, twice the number of texture units and added a much improved pixel-shader architecture. Yet, the 6800 Ultra was fabricated on the same (IBM) 130 nanometer process node as the FX 5950, and it consumed slightly less power. Early benchmarks put the 6800 series at a disadvantage when compared to similarly priced ATI cards. Newer drivers have improved performance on both companies' products. Against the ATI's Radeon X800XT PE, its direct competitor, the 6800 Ultra performed comparably in most synthetic and game benchmarks, with each card showing its individual strengths in different gaming applications. Nvidia's part is strong in many applications programmed for OpenGL (a traditional strength of Nvidia), while ATI leads in many Direct3D applications. Thus, it is now generally accepted that the GeForce 6800 Ultra is similar in performance to the Radeon X800 XT, and that the GeForce 6800 GT generally performs better than the Radeon X800 Pro. In the view of many, the 6800 Ultra gave Nvidia a performance boost it had not seen since the early days of the GeForce product-line. In the aftermath of the GeForce FX series (which could only offer competitive performance in OpenGL applications), the 6800 restored faith in Nvidia's ability to deliver a competitive product. This was quite important, as the 6800 Ultra made a strong positive impression on a skeptical market, helping Nvidia regain mindshare it had lost in the aftermath of the GeForce FX. Like all of Nvidia's GPUs up until 2004, initial 6800 members were designed for the AGP bus. Nvidia added support for the PCI Express (PCIe) bus in later GeForce 6 products, usually by use of an AGP-PCIe bridge chip. In the case of the 6800GT and 6800Ultra, Nvidia developed a variant of the NV40 chip called the NV45. The NV45 shares the same die core as the NV40, but embeds an AGP-PCIe bridge on the chip's package. (Internally, the NV45 is an AGP NV40 with added bus-translation logic, to permit interfacing with a PCIe motherboard. Externally, the NV45 is a single chip with two separate silicon dies clearly visible on the top.) The use of an AGP-PCIe bridge chip initially led to fears that natively-AGP GPUs would not be able to take advantage of the additional bandwidth offered by PCIe and would therefore be at a disadvantage relative to native PCIe chips. However, benchmarking reveals that even AGP 4x is fast enough that most contemporary games do not improve significantly in performance when switched to AGP 8x, rendering the further bandwidth increase provided by PCIe largely superfluous. Additionally, Nvidia's on-board implementations of AGP are clocked at AGP 12x or 16x, providing bandwidth comparable to PCIe for the rare situations when this bandwidth is actually necessary. The use of a bridge chip allowed Nvidia to release a full complement of PCIe graphics cards without having to redesign them for the PCIe interface. Later, when Nvidia's GPUs were designed to use PCIe natively, the bidirectional bridge chip allowed them to be used in AGP cards. ATI, initially a critic of the bridge chip, eventually designed a similar mechanism for their own cards. Nvidia's professional Quadro line contains members drawn from the 6800 series: Quadro FX 4000 (AGP) and the Quadro FX 3400, 4400 and 4400g (both PCI Express). The 6800 series was also incorporated into laptops with the GeForce Go 6800 and Go 6800 Ultra GPUs. PureVideo and the AGP GeForce 6800PureVideo expanded the level of multimedia-video support from decoding of MPEG-2 video to decoding of more advanced codecs (MPEG-4, WMV9), enhanced post-processing (advanced de-interlacing), and limited acceleration for encoding. But perhaps ironically, the first GeForce product(s) to offer PureVideo, the AGP GeForce 6800/GT/Ultra, failed to support all of PureVideo's advertised features. Media player software (WMP9) with support for WMV-acceleration did not become available until several months after the 6800's introduction. User and web reports showed little if any difference between PureVideo enabled GeForces and non-Purevideo cards. The prolonged public silence of Nvidia, after promising updated drivers, and test benchmarks gathered by users led the user community to conclude that the WMV9 decoder component of the AGP 6800's PureVideo unit is either non-functional or intentionally disabled. In late 2005, an update to Nvidia's website finally confirmed what had long been suspected by the user community: WMV-acceleration is not available on the AGP 6800. Of course, today's standard computers are fast enough to play WMV9 video and other sophisticated codecs like MPEG-4, H.264 or Theora without hardware acceleration. GeForce 6 series general features
6800 chipset table
Notes
GeForce 6600 SeriesThe GeForce 6600 (NV43) was officially launched on August 12th, 2004, several months after the launch of the 6800 Ultra. With half the pixel pipelines and vertex shaders of the 6800 GT, and a smaller 128-bit memory bus, the lower-performance and lower-cost 6600 is the mainstream product of the GeForce 6 series. The 6600 series retains the core rendering features of the 6800 series, including SLI. Equipped with fewer rendering units, the 6600 series processes pixel data at a slower rate than the more powerful 6800 series. However, the reduction in hardware resources, and migration to TSMC's 110 nanometer manufacturing process (versus the 6800's 130 nm process), make the 6600 both less expensive for Nvidia to manufacture and less expensive for customers to purchase. Their 6600 series currently has three variants: the GeForce 6600LE, the 6600, and the 6600GT (in order from slowest to fastest.) The 6600 GT performs quite a bit better than the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra or Radeon 9800 XT, with the 6600 GT scoring around 8000 in 3DMark03, while the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra scored around 6000, and it is also much cheaper. Notably, the 6600 GT offered identical performance to ATI's high-end X800 PRO graphics card with drivers previous December of 2004, when running the popular game Doom 3 (afterwards ATI optimized their drivers and was able to distance itself slightly from the 6600GT). It was also about as fast as the higher-end GeForce 6800 when running games without anti-aliasing in most scenarios. At introduction, the 6600 family was only available in PCI Express form. AGP models became available roughly a month later, through the use of Nvidia's AGP-PCIe bridge chip. A majority of the AGP GeForce 6600GTs have their memory clocked at 900 MHz, which is 100 MHz below the PCI-E card, on which the memory operates at 1000 MHz. This can contribute to a performance decline when playing certain games. However, many times it is possible to "overclock" the memory to its nominal frequency of 1000 MHz. 6600 chipset table
Other data for PCI Express based cards:
Other data for AGP based cards:
GeForce 6500The GeForce 6500 was released in October 2005 and is based on the same NV44 core as the GeForce 6200TC, but with a higher GPU clock speed and more memory. The GeForce 6500 also supports SLI. GeForce 6500
GeForce 6200With just 4 pixel pipelines, the 6200 series forms Nvidia's value/budget (low-end or entry level) product. The 6200 omits memory compression and SLI support, but otherwise offers similar rendering features as the 6600s. The currently shipping 6200 boards are based on the NV44 core (s), which is the final production silicon for the 6200 series. However, at introduction, production silicon was not yet ready. Nvidia fulfilled 6200 orders by shipping binned/rejected 6600 series cores (NV43V). The rejects were factory modified to disable four-pixel pipelines, thereby converting the native 6600 product into a 6200 product. Some users were able to "unlock" early 6200 boards through a software utility (effectively converting the 6200 back into a 6600 with the complete set of eight pixel pipelines total) if they owned boards with an NV43 A2 or earlier revision of the core. Thus, not all NV43-based 6200 boards could successfully be unlocked (specifically, those with a core revision of A4 or higher), and as soon as NV44 production silicon became available, Nvidia discontinued shipments of downgraded NV43V cores. However, there are still reports of people successfully unlocking pipelines and overclocking the newest 6200A NV44A chip ranges, using older Geforce drivers.[citation needed] GeForce 6200 chip specificationsGeForce 6200
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