Since NV40's introduction with the 6800 Ultra the 6800 line has been fleshed out a little, with a total of three boards available in retail: 6800, 6800 GT and 6800 Ultra. In this article Beyond3D compares these three boards, looking at the configuration differences between them and, of course, their respective performances. "In the case of the 6800 chip redundancy is used, whereby what would otherwise be completely dysfunctional, cores can be salvaged - in this case if a defect shows up in a pixel quad on an NV40 chip then this quad can be disabled and sold as a 6800, likewise if a defect shows up in one of the vertex shader pipelines."
Along with the usual rounds of Games, Shader, FSAA and Filtering testing Beyond3D also takes a look at Shader Model 3.0 performance, now that DirectX9.0c has been released, the performance changes across a few driver releases and also look at the video decoding performance. Read the full article here.