GeForce 6 Series
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Image:NVIDIA GeForce 6 Series logo.png 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.
Launched on April 14th 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 shortcomings of its predecessor (GeForce FX), 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.
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GeForce 6 Series features
SLI
The 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 name for the late 3dfx's Scan-Line Interleave scheme, NVIDIA and 3dfx's SLI technologies are different in principle.) 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 Technology
NVIDIA 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 minimal CPU utilization and low power consumption. The precision subpixel processing enables videos to be scaled to any size.
Shader Model 3.0
While 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, 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.
Caveats
There are reports of incompatibility between 6 series cards and some wide aspect ratio LCD panels when connected through DVI.
GeForce 6800 Series
The 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 50-80% faster than NVidia's previous top-line product (the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra), packed twice the number of pixel pipelines, 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 a 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 6800
Purevideo 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 products(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 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, PCs with sufficiently fast CPUs are able to play WMV9 video without hardware acceleration.
GeForce 6800 series general features
- 4, 8, 12, or 16 pixel-pipeline GPU architecture
- Up-to 8x more shading performance compared to the previous generation
- CineFX 3.0 engine - DirectX Shaders model 3.0 for really nice visual effects
- On Chip Video processor (PureVideo)
- Full MPEG-2 encoding and decoding at GPU level (PureVideo)
- Advanced Adaptive De-Interlacing (PureVideo)
- GDDR1 and GDDR-3 memory on a 256-bit wide Memory interface
- UltraShadow II technology - 3x to 4x faster than NV35 (FX/5900)
- High Precision Dynamic Range (HPDR) technology
- 128-bit studio precision through the entire pipeline - 32-bit Color precision
- IntelliSample 3.0 Technology - 16x Anisotropic Filtering & Rotating Grid Antialiasing
- Max Resolution is 2048x1536@85 Hz
- Video Scaling and Filtering - HQ filtering techniques up to HDTV resolutions
- Integrated TV Encoder - TV-output up to 1028x768 resolutions
- OpenGL 1.5 Optimizations and support (2.0 on some 6800 GT and Ultra)
- DVC 3.0 (Digital Vibrance Control)
- Dual 400 MHz RAMDACs which support QXGA displays up to 2048x1536 @ 85 Hz
- Dual DVI on select members (Depending on the Card Manufacturer.)
6800 chipset table
| Board Name | Core Type | Core (MHz) | Memory (MHz) | Pipeline Config | Vertex Processors | Memory Interface | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6800 Ultra - Extreme Edition | NV40 | 450 | 1200 | 16 | 6 | 256-bit | |
| 6800 Ultra | NV40 | 400 | 1100 | 16 | 6 | 256-bit | |
| 6800 GT | NV40/NV45 | 350 | 1000 | 16 | 6 | 256-bit | |
| 6800 GS | NV40/NV42 | 425 | 1000 | 12 | 6 | 256-bit | |
| 6800 GTO | NV40/NV45 | 350 | 900 | 12 | 5 | 256-bit | |
| 6800 | NV40/NV41 NV42. | 325 | 700 | 12 | 5 | 256-bit | |
| 6800 XT | NV40/NV42 | 325 | 600 | 8 | 4 | 256-bit | |
| 6800 LE | NV40 | 300 | 700 | 8 | 4 | 256-bit |
Notes
-Some 6800 Ultras (including a few 6800 Ultra Extreme Editions) were produced on the short-lived NV48 core which was built on a 110nm process, allowing higher clockspeeds.
-The GeForce 6800 GS is cheaper to manufacture and has a lower MSRP than the GeForce 6800 GT because it has fewer pipelines and a smaller process (110 vs 130 nm), but performance is similar because it has a faster core clock. The AGP version, however, uses the original NV40 chip and 6800 GT circuit board and may be capable of re-activating the inactive pixel and vertex pipes. Unfortunately, the PCI Express version lacks them entirely, precluding such modifications.
-The 6800 GTO (which was produced only as an OEM card) contains four masked pixel pipelines and one masked vertex shader, which are potentially unlockable.
-The GeForce 6800 is often unofficially called the "GeForce 6800 Vanilla" or the "GeForce 6800 NU" (for Non-Ultra) to distinguish it from the other models. Recent PCIe variants have the NV41 (IBM 0.13 micrometre) or NV42 (TSMC 0.11 micrometre) cores, which are native PCIe implementations and do not have an integrated AGP bridge chip. The AGP version of the video card contains four masked pixel pipelines and one masked vertex shader, which are potentially unlockable through software mods. PCI-Express 6800 cards are incapable of such modifications, because the extra pixel pipelines and vertex buffers are nonexistent.
-The 6800 XT varies greatly depending on manufacturer. It is produced on two cores (NV40/NV42), four memory configurations (128MB GDDR, 256 MB GDDR, 128 MB GDDR3, and 256 MB GDDR3), and has clock speeds ranging from 300-425 (core) and 600-1000 (memory). 6800 XT cards based on the NV40 core contain eight masked pixel pipelines and two masked vertex shaders, and those based on the NV42 core contain four masked pipelines and one masked shader (for whatever reason, the NV42 cards are almost never unlockable. Speculation: the pipelines are being laser-cut).
-The 6800 LE contains eight masked pixel pipelines and two masked vertex shaders, which are potentially unlockable.
GeForce 6600 Series
The 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.) A fourth member, the GeForce 6610 XL, is expected to be released soon. 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.
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.
6600 chipset table
| Board Name | Core Type | Core (MHz) | Memory (MHz) | Pipeline Config | Vertex Processors | Memory Interface | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6700 XL | NV43 | 525 | 1100 | 8 | 3 | 128-bit | |
| 6600 GT GDDR3 | NV43 | 500 | 900/1000 | 8 | 3 | 128-bit | |
| 6610 XL | NV43 | 400 | 800 | 8 | 3 | 128-bit | |
| 6600 GDDR2 | NV43 | 350 | 800 | 8 | 3 | 128-bit | |
| 6600 | NV43 | 300 | 500/550 | 8 | 3 | 128-bit | |
| 6600 LE | NV43 | 300 | 500 | 4 | 3 | 128-bit |
GeForce 6500
The GeForce 6500 was released in October 2005 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
- Core Clock: 450 MHz
- Memory Clock: 700 MHz
- Pixel Pipelines: 4
- Number of ROPs: 2
- Vertex Processors: 3
- Memory: 128MB/256MB GDDR1 on a 64-bit interface
GeForce 6200
With just 4 pixel pipelines, the 6200 series forms NVIDIA's value/budget (low-end) 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.
GeForce 6200 chip specifications
GeForce 6200
- Core Clock: 300 MHz
- Memory Clock: 550 MHz
- Pixel Pipelines: 4
- Vertex Processors: 3
- Memory: 128 MB/256 MB/512 MB [1] GDDR1 on a 64-bit/128-bit interface
- MSRP, (RRP): 128 MB: $129 USD, 256 MB: $149 USD
GeForce 6200 TurboCache / AGP
The GeForce 6200 TurboCache / AGP (NV44/NV44a) is a natively four-pipeline version of the NV43. NV44 cards only have a very small (by modern standards) amount of memory, but make up for this by using system memory accessed through the PCI-Express bus.
GeForce 6200 TurboCache / AGP chip specifications
GeForce 6200 PCI-Express (NV44) TurboCache
- Core Clock: 350 MHz
- Memory Clock: 700 MHz
- Pixel Pipelines: 4
- Number of ROPs: 2
- Vertex Processors: 3
- Memory: 16 MB/32 MB/64 MB GDDR1 on a 32-bit/64-bit interface
- GeForce 6200 w/ TurboCache supporting 128 MB, including 16 MB of local TurboCache (32-bit)
- GeForce 6200 w/ TurboCache supporting 128 MB, including 32 MB of local TurboCache (64-bit)
- GeForce 6200 w/ TurboCache supporting 256 MB, including 64 MB of local TurboCache (64-bit)
GeForce 6200 AGP (NV44a) without TurboCache
- Core Clock: 350 MHz
- Memory Clock: 500/400 MHz
- Pixel Pipelines: 4
- Number of ROPs: 2
- Vertex Processors: 3
- Memory: 128-256 MB GDDR1 on a 64-bit interface
GeForce 6200 PCI (NV44) without TurboCache
BFG Technologies introduced a unique PCI version of the Geforce 6200.
- Core Clock: 350 MHz
- Memory Clock: 400 MHz
- Pixel Pipelines: 4
- Memory: 256 (BFG Technologies 6200 OC PCI) / 128 (BFG Technologies 3DFuzion GeForce 6200 PCI) MB DDR on a 64-bit interface
GeForce 6100 series
In late 2005 NVIDIA introduced a new member to the GeForce family, the 6100 series, also known as C51. The term GeForce 6100/6150 actually refers to an nForce4-based motherboard with an integrated NV44 core, as opposed to a standalone graphics card. NVIDIA released this product both to follow up its immensely popular GeForce4 MX based nForce and nForce2 boards and to compete with ATI's RS480/482 and Intel's GMA 900/950 in the integrated graphics space. The 6100 series is very competitive, usually tying with or just edging out the ATI products in most benchmarks.
The motherboards use two different types of southbridges - the nForce 410 and the nForce 430. They are fairly similar in features to the nForce4 Ultra motherboards that were on the market before them. Both feature PCI Express and PCI support, eight USB 2.0 ports, integrated sound, two Parallel ATA ports, and SATA II (300 Mbit/s) with Native Command Queuing (NCQ) - two SATA ports in the case of the 410, four in the 430. The 430 southbridge also supports Gigabit Ethernet with NVIDIA's ActiveArmor hardware firewall, while the 410 supports standard 10/100 ethernet only.
GeForce 6100 series chip specifications
Both the 6100 and 6150 support Shader Model 3.0 and DirectX 9.0c. The 6150 also features support for High-Definition video playback, PureVideo Processing, DVI, and video-out while the 6100 does not.
GeForce 6100
- Core Clock: 425 MHz
- Pixel Pipelines: 2
- Vertex Processors: 1
- Memory: Usually 32/64/128MB shared DDR400
GeForce 6150
- Core Clock: 475 MHz
- Pixel Pipelines: 2
- Vertex Processors: 1
- Memory: Usually 32/64/128MB shared DDR400
Currently the boards are slated to be available in three different varieties - the GeForce 6100 with 410 southbridge geared toward low-end machines, the GeForce 6100 with 430 southbridge for more mainstream PCs, and the GeForce 6150 with 430 southbridge for multimedia PCs. Initially, a rumor circulated that the 6150/430 pairing was recalled due to ActiveArmor and "data corruption" problems, but this was refuted by NVidia. In November 2005, the GeForce 6100 series was the only variety available in AMD socket 754 and 939 variants. As of Jan 2006 this has been rectified with boards such as the Asus A8N-VM CSM.
See also