Just read Anandtech.com's article on this new card. If you wish to get the detailed information go here as this post is just my personal opinion on the card with some brief notations of specs.
First look:
I saw the size of the card
the fan is freaking huge! and the card is pretty long. So if you have a short depth case you are going to have issues. I dont thing there would be issues with the space btw your AGP and first PCI slot with the fan but possible with some motherboards.
DirectX 9.0c
As noted 9.0c came out yesterday, though I can't find a download link on microsoft's site yet, so if you can post it so I can download it. With this new patch to DirectX comes Vertex Shader 3.0, supposely using better mapping of textures on the concept of using a single 3d Model to make multiple objects. Therefore, having a single model used for every tree, bush or what have you will cut down on CPU/GPU strain and increase graphics without decreasing performance. The 6800 showed this a bit, but first benchmark I saw for it was FarCry:
@ 1024x768/ 32-bit/ 60 Hz/ 3.2 GHZ p4/1 GB DDR400/ MAP:
showed only a 20 fps increase over the ATI Radeon 9800 XT, which equates to a 36% increase. There was a 2x increase in Halo
9800 XT |||||||||||36fps
6800 Ultra||||||||||||||||||||||66.8fps
I wish there was a test on BF Vietnam as me and Thomas discussed that the graphics are intense on this game in the textures of grass,trees,etc.
The card shows stronger power at higher resolutions though,
UT 2004 @ 1600x1200 res. it is almost twice as fast FPS wise, however at 1280x1024 it only increases about 4 fps... this worries me, I dont like to see those differences. Yes you could argue that it is good that we are moving towards cards that can handle higher resolutions so we can see more of the screen(as many of us have seen 2003 or 2004 at 1600x1200 and could see the rest of the weapon that before wasn't seen.), however I believe that this is irrelevant in the end as varying performance per resolution also could spell disaster for performance varance per game...
The card is also 500 dollars retail... unless you opt for the non-Ultra @ 299 dollars, but the non-ultra runs around the same benchmarks as 9800 XT...
I just don't think Nvidia has done it yet, nice specs, sounds good for use of the new DirectX technology but we all know that ATI will have all this and more in the upcoming upgrade chipset. For now, IMO I'd stick with the 9800 XT as the top card of choice as it still is probably best choice for cost per performance. Though the 9800 Pro is still nice if you want a really good deal. I'm running UT2004 on 9800 Pro at 1280x1024/32-bit/all settings maxed and get 40-50 FPS averaged. So the card is still good.
Save your money till the next gen. ATI card comes out and see what happens is my advice. If you have 9800 PRO, I wouldn't jump to 9800 XT. If you are back in the Radeon 9200 days, yeah you need to upgrade to at least a 9600 XT(only $174.00) at least for the newer games that are soon to arrive as well all the stuff that is out now.
That is just my 'lengthy' run down on this new card though there is a whole bunch more information on that website above.[/url]
