Tuesday, November 08, 2005
GeForce 6800 GS: The New Price/Performance King?
Though there's been some general price depression all around, our conclusions from the previous "best GPU bang for the buck" shootout still hold true: GeForce 6600GT and Radeon X700 Pro cards are good for the $150 range, but while their price/performance ratio is high, they don't offer the kind of raw speed necessary to let you really enjoy games like F.E.A.R. and Quake 4 the way they're meant to be played. The real deals are the GeForce 6800 GT and Radeon X800 XL, especially since both have now fallen in price to under $300. Either card will give you all the features and performance necessary to play all of today's games without turning all the detail levels down.
Is there a better option? Nvidia thinks there should be, so the company is adding a new SKU just in time for the holiday season, ahead of ATI's new Radeon X1600 cards (expected to ship at the end of this month). The GeForce 6800 GS aims to offer the best performance at the most reasonable price. Is this our new price/performance champ? 
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The sweet spot
We are often asked "Which video card should I buy?" We always answer with "well how much do you want to spend?" The inevitable reply is that everyone wants to run all the latest graphics-heavy games at high resolutions with all the features enabled, but they only want to spend $100 to $150 to do so. Sorry to say, but that's just not going to happen.
The real sweet spot for graphics is in the $250 to $300 price range. Sure, some of those sub-$200 deliver more frames per second per dollar spent, but they're generally just not fast enough to run those really graphics-intensive games at decent resolutions, unless you're willing to go into your game options menu and turn the details down to "medium."
| GeForce 6800 GS | GeForce 6800 GT | Radeon X800 XL | |
| Estimate price | $249 | $279-$299 | $279-$299 |
| Core clock speed | 425MHz | 350MHz | 400MHz |
| Memory clock speed | 1.0GHz (500MHz DDR) | 1.0GHz (500MHz DDR) | 1.0GHz (500MHz DDR) |
| Amount of RAM | 256MB GDDR3 | 256MB GDDR3 | 256MB GDDR3 |
| Pixel shader processors | 12 | 16 | 16 |
| Vertex shader processors | 5 | 6 | 6 |
If $250 to $300 is the best price range to buy a graphics card that won't be obsolete within a year, what are your choices? The best two existing cards in that price range are the GeForce 6800 GT and Radeon X800 XL, both of which come in 256MB flavors at the upper end of that price range. We should note that the GeForce 6800 GT launched last year at $400, but has fallen in price considerably since then. The more recent Radeon X800 XL launched with an average street price of around $340 or so, and if you shop around you can find it for maybe $50 less these days.
Nvidia's new GeForce 6800 GS aims to compete with these cards, with a general estimated MSRP around $30 cheaper, but impressive specs nonetheless. Note that it has the same memory bandwidth as the slightly more expensive 6800 GT and X800 XL, but comes in at a higher clock speed. It's got 12 pixel pipelines (like the general GeForce 6800) and five vertex shader pipes, but it still compares well with the 6800 GT, due to a much higher core clock speed.
In all other ways, the 6800 GS is comparable to the other GeForce 6 series cards. It's got the same PureVideo processor capabilities, and exactly the same architecture, with the same Shader Model 3.0 support.
Benchmark and Testbed Setup
There's really not much of a story to tell here. It's simply a matter of "there's a new GeForce 6 series SKU, how does it perform?"
We ran through a score of benchmarks on the following system.
| Component | Athlon 64 FX-55 system |
| Processor | Athlon FX-55 |
| Motherboard and chipset | ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe (nForce 4 SLI chipset) |
| Memory | 2 x 512MB DDR400 (CAS 2-2-2-5) |
| Hard drive | Seagate 7200.7 160GB SATA Drive |
| Optical drive | ATAPI DVD-ROM Drive |
| Audio | Sound Blaster Audigy 2 |
| Operating system | Windows XP Professional with SP2 |
We used the latest Catalyst 10 drivers for our ATI card and the recently released beta Forceware 81.87 drivers on the Nvidia card.
Our GeForce 6800 GS card is a reference model, running at reference clock speeds. If history is any indication, several manufacturers will offer overclocked models, sometimes at the same or lower price as the general estimated MSRP quoted here ($249).
We use a variety of applications to test 3D performance:
3DMark05: Futuremark's latest synthetic graphics benchmark, 3DMark 05, is a very forward-looking test. It's heavy on DX9 shaders, and runs optimized code for either Shader Model 2.0 or 3.0 depending on your card's capabilities.
Far Cry: Crytek's shooter Far Cry is one of the most graphically demanding games on the market. It will run optimized code paths for shader model 3.0 or 2.0b if your card supports it. Our test runs the four demos included in the 1.3 patch, and takes their geometric mean to produce a final score.
Doom 3: How can you review a graphics card without testing the latest id Software game? Nvidia almost always scores better on this title, whether it's because the developers optimized more for Nvidia's architecture, or Nvidia designed with id's engine in mind.
Half-Life 2: We run a couple of custom-recorded demos of single player play, and then take their geometric mean to produce an overall score. It's a great example of a high-end, very efficient and optimized game engine.
Call of Duty 2 Demo: Infinity Ward has dropped the Quake engine in favor of their own new DX9 code. We recorded our own custom timedemo and ran through it with all the visual quality settings cranked up. We look forward to benchmarking the full game when it is released.
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory: UbiSoft's latest Sam Fischer adventure uses an all-new engine, rich with detail and pretty heavy on shaders. It can operate in a Shader Model 1.1 mode, or a Shader Model 3.0 mode. We run both, and enable the optional high dynamic range rendering mode with SM 3.0 or 2.0. Because HDR and antialiasing only work together with this game on ATI's X1000 series cards, we disabled AA on our tests using Shader Model 3.0 or 2.0.
F.E.A.R.: Monolith's new shooter is one of the prettiest, grittiest, and most graphically demanding games ever. We patch the game to version 1.01 and use the built in performance test to measure average frame rate, with all settings turned up to the max. There is one exception: the Soft Shadows option doesn't work properly with antialiasing. We disable it for all testing.
3DMark05 results
Futuremark's latest 3D benchmark is the only synthetic test we use to judge video card performance. That is, it's the only test we use that isn't an actual game. Why? Simply put, we believe that it's a pretty good look at future game graphics. The test are well designed to mimic the type of code and content we'll see in games coming over the next year or so—those that utilize DirectX 9 shaders heavily. 
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Given that the GeForce 6800 GS has a suggested retail price of $30 to $50 less than the 6800 GT or Radeon X800 XL, we're very pleased to see it score basically equal to those cards in 3DMark. This is at stock speeds, no less: Overclocked GeForce cards are quite common from Nvidia's board partners.
Half-Life 2 and Doom 3
Valve's Half-Life 2 is one of the more graphically advanced games available today, making fairly heavy use of shaders in some areas. It is well engineered and optimized to make the most out of almost any graphics card. 
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Just as Doom 3 is "Nvidia's game" on the previous generation chips, Half-Life 2 is "ATI's game," though the gap is smaller here. The 6800 GS actually outperforms the more expensive 6800 GT on this one, though only by the smallest amount. 
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Nvidia holds a sizeable lead in Doom 3 benchmarks; this should come as no surprise by now. The new X1000 architecture cards have a driver that takes advantage of the programmable memory controller to improve performance in Doom 3 and Quake 4, but you'll see no such benefit in the X800 cards.
Far Cry and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
With vast outdoor scenes flush with vegetation, complex water, and a fair amount of normal mapping, Far Cry pushes most graphics cards to the limit. The 1.3 patch ships with four built-in demos. We run all four and take their geometric mean to produce a final score. 
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Again the $249 (estimated) 6800 GS appears to be a pretty good match for slightly more expensive cards. This is really good news for those trying to get a good graphics card without spending insane sums of money.
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory can run in a Shader Model 1.1 mode that is compatible with all modern video cards or a Shader Model 3.0 mode only available to Nvidia cards. The latter allows the use of some limited high dynamic range (HDR) effects. We run the benchmark in both SM 1.1 mode and SM 3.0 with HDR. Antialiasing is incompatible with HDR rendering on Nvidia's hardware, so we run our two test resolutions with and without anisotropic filtering instead to keep the playing field level. There's a SM 2.0 path that we use for the Radeon X800 XL, since that card does not support SM 3.0. 
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In this price range, ATI and Nvidia run Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory about equally. ATI is pulling ahead where AA and AF are enabled (always a strong suit of theirs), but remember that the X800 XL is a bit more expensive than the 6800 GS, too. That, and our 6800 GS is running at stock clock speeds, while we have heard from some vendors that they plan to offer overclocked cards.
Call of Duty 2 and F.E.A.R.
We use our own custom timedemo recording in the Call of Duty 2 demo to measure performance. 
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We have no idea what the heck is going on here. Nvidia scores far lower than expected in our Call of Duty 2 timedemo. We've seen it run much faster than this on Nvidia cards before, so we can only guess that this is due to some bug in the 81.87 drivers. We tried reinstalling drivers, running the demo in safe mode and reconfiguring it, we even uninstalled the demo, deleted the directory entirely, and reinstalled it. We simply can't figure out why the scores are abnormally low, but it was repeatable.
Especially odd is the way the GeForce 6800 GT dropped to 10 frames per second at 1280x1024 with AA and AF enabled. We're presenting these numbers because we were able to reproduce them over and over, even after spending too much time troubleshooting, but I wouldn't put too much faith in them. We know from experience that Nvidia cards run the game better than this—we just couldn't figure out what was wrong in time.
With rich real-time lighting all over, spectacular dynamic lighting, tons of normal mapping, lots of physics, and particle systems galore, F.E.A.R. will give your computer a real workout. We disable Soft Shadows in all our testing, since it is incompatible with antialiasing. Note that F.E.A.R. gives a warning if you turn the texture detail up beyond Medium with a 128MB card. Though it recommends this setting only be used with cards that have 256MB or more, we run it this way anyway. If a 128MB card scores poorly, that will only serve as a good example of why you'd want to buy one with more video memory. It's important to apply the 1.01 patch that was released simultaneously with the game, as it can drastically improve performance in some cases. 
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Nvidia's sub-$300 graphics cards outperform ATI's in Monolith's impressive new shooter when AA and AF are disabled, but ATI catches up with those features turned on. The shortage of four pipelines hurts the 6800 GS's performance with AA and AF a bit, but it still holds up well against these slightly more expensive competitors.
Final Thoughts
We're pretty impressed with this new midrange SKU from Nvidia. At a suggested retail price of $249, with a core clock of 425MHz and a memory clock of 500MHz, it's a very good performer. On the whole, it matches the performance of a GeForce 6800 GT; a card which debuted at $399 and has since fallen to a $279 to $299 level. It also lines up quite nicely with ATI's $279 to $299 card, the Radeon X800 XL. That matchup is a bit less even, with the ATI part faster in a few games and slower in a few others.
Though we know there will be some cards with these clock speeds at a $249 price, we really can't in good faith call this a review. What we tested was a reference card from Nvidia, and we know companies like BFG and XFX plan to offer overclocked cards. We don't have exact speeds or prices from Nvidia's partners just yet, but if history is any guide, there will be overclocked cards available for $249 and cards at the stock clock speeds that you can find easily online for $20 to $30 less. This makes for an impressive bargain and a huge step up from the generic GeForce 6800.
The big question: How will this fare against ATI's similarly priced X1000 series card, the Radeon X1600 XT? In short, we don't know. X1600 cards aren't even supposed to ship out until the end of this month, the recent launch of the X1800 and X1300 cards have us doubting when you'll actually be able to buy them, and what the price will be. It wouldn't make sense for us to test that card now, when nobody can buy it, the price and real availability is undetermined, and when there will surely be drivers in the coming weeks that change its performance characteristics. What we do know is this: With the GeForce 6800 GS, Nvidia has set a difficult bar to leap, and in doing so has injected a lot of value into the most important price segment.
| Product: | Nvidia GeForce 6800 GS |
| Company: | www.nvidia.com |
| Price: | $249 (est., will vary depending on OEM.) |
| Pros: | Higher clock rates and near-6800GT performance in a lower cost card. |
| Cons: | No AGP version yet. |
| Summary: | Nvidia may have a winner on its hands with the 6800GS, but we'll have to see how it fares against the similar ATI X1600. |
