NV40 aka GeForce 6800 Ultra early FS2004 Benchies & Image Quality Results:http://mbnet.fi/elixir/NV40/10817474486qLMOmeutS_6_6_l.jpghttp://mbnet.fi/elixir/NV40/10817474486qLMOmeutS_6_5_l.gifhttp://koti.mbnet.fi/elixir/NV40/108174744...eutS_1_15_l.jpghttp://mbnet.fi/elixir/NV40/10817474486qLMOmeutS_2_1_l.gifIt has to be stressed that the NV40 Ultra used here ran at 400 Mhz GPU clock while the upcoming ATI monster R420 is expected to run @ up to ~600 Mhz.

Hi There Airbuzz,Very cool! I don't see a whole ot of difference in the screenshot between the 9800XT and the 6800U. But I know things can certainly be different when actually runnning the sim than they are in screenshots. But the difference in Avg. FPS sure looks nice! :-eekOne thing that would be a little interesting to know besides just the cards is your system specs. I take it it's one of the latest and greatest though. I could see it's an Intel from the chipset or whatever that chip is. So I'm guessing it's probably a 3.2 GHz with 800 MHz FSB.Thanks for sharing the info and those snapshots. :)Cheers,Jim

More information can be read here, the source of the images is a reviewer's site called "HardOCP".http://discuss.futuremark.com/forum/showfl...=0&fpart=1&vc=1

The 6800 ULTRA sure seem to be on par with the 9800XT image quality wise. That it

Also bear in mind that the graph also shows that the ATI card was running at the same resolution but with less Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic filtering and yet is still abit slower. The Geforce FX 5950 card was only running at 1024x768.Pretty good frame rates there really.Some of the other benchmarks I have seen have made both the older cards look quite sad really.Call of Duty benchmarks Ive seen have had the new card running almost 3 times faster in some tests.Pretty amazing really.

Yes this is a new generation and with that enormous performance boosts is had. And the competition is stronger now than ever ATI and nVidia making everything to kill eachother :DBut I wonder why they tested the 5950 ULTRA on lower res than the 9800XT and the 6800U? Was it too slow for that res?Another thing that just makes me so happy is that brilinear is dead!! You are finally being able to run full trilinear filtering with nVidia video cards which makes them up to par with the 9800XT really. Image quality comparisons with mip maps shows just about no difference in mip map quality really. I guess this finally is the proof that nVidia went with these optimizations to cover up the 59xx series poor performance but now finally feel they don

The R420 will have bruteforce DirectX 9.0(:( performance while still beeing an old generation card. If we focus to FS2004, the R420 has very good chances to kick the NV40U. It's the same thing with 9800XT <-> NV5950U whereas the 9800XT simply rulz in FS2004 (up to today).

Believe me the R420 is not an old generation video card. True it will do away with shader model 3.0 support but it

Wow I just noticed the PSU requirements. A 480 PSU is recommended for the 6800 ULTRA!!I got a 550 W Antec so I am hopefully home free but I have 4 harddrives spinning and other stuff... And if the video card sees you have low voltage it downclocks it to nonULTRA speeds...

>Wow I just noticed the PSU requirements. A 480 PSU is>recommended for the 6800 ULTRA!!>Well yes but according to some reviews I had read thats just more like a recommendation. Toms Hardware previewed it and said that it only required alittle more power than a ATI Radeon Pro 9800XT.But I guess anyway that a power supply of over 400 watts will be needed as like you say if you have lots of hard drives and fans then that will go up and of course faster processors require more juiceCraig

Looks very good. Normally, I take FS2004 benchmark result with a grain of salt...wait - with a couple of buckets of salt - because it's virtually impossible to set up a 100% repeatable benchmark run. However, it seems like many other games mirror the FS2004 results and the card should be a good deal faster than the current cards. Will have to wait and see if the improvemnt justifies replacing my 9700 Pro that I have now owned for almost 19 months.It's also good to see that they fixed the anisotropic filtering and FSAA quality which were quite horrible with the previous Nvidia cards.But OMG - TWO molex connectors :-lol :-lol Why not just supply the videocard in a separate case with its own power supply and cooling contraptions :-lolAlso one has to wonder how much this new card will cost. At least $500, that's for sure - probably more.It's a good idea to wait until the R420 is released. Even if it's slower, it's likely that the price of the 6800U will go down.

In essence, looking at the visual quality and FPS comparisons, it looks like the battle is not whether the R420 kicks the NV40 in FS2004, but whether the difference in cost between the 9800XT and the 6800U is sufficient to cover the cost of also upgrading CPU, RAM and mobo with the 9800XT. Given that the 6800 will be around $299 and the 6800U $499, but that the power supply may also add to that cost, it could be a close run thing.A `meaningful` comparison for flight sim users would be to see whether the price decrease in the 9800XT which will surely follow might free up money to allow a system upgrade to maximise the 9800XT?The increases shown here in these benchmarks once again introduce the bottleneck of the CPU. Sticking the latest, greatest card into your existing system for FS2004 alone makes no sense from what I've seen here, but once the real sim tweakers get their hands on the card it might be that the increased capabilities of the NV40 might be utilised in adjusted game settings. It is obvious from the HardOCP screenies that they haven't tweaked the FS9.cfg to increase the scenery detail distance, and they're not flying over complicated mesh or photoreal or photompaaed terrain. It's possible you could wind up all the visual settings with the new card and never see a fps reduction. THAT'S what I'm waiting to find out, along with the benefits of PCI Express. Allcott

I don

>Wow I just noticed the PSU requirements. A 480 PSU is>recommended for the 6800 ULTRA!!>OMG! I'm pretty sure I would need to upgrade my PSU(Enermax 430) just to think about getting this card then. That would be an expensive propsition in my eyes.Jim

"But I agree it