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Nvidia revs GeForce 6600, 6600 GT
But won't do much for Doom 3 until late September
Nvidia today launched its much-anticipated mid-range graphics chips, the GeForce 6600 series, just in time to tempt punters whose existing graphics cards aren't up to snuff for Doom 3.
The 6600 and 6600 GT are based on the GeForce 6800 but provide just eight pixel processing pipelines. Both support up to 128MB of memory across a 128-bit bus, but while the 6600 uses regular DDR SDRAM, the GT works with GDDR 3 clocked to 1GHz for a memory bandwidth of 16GBps.
The GT also supports Nvidia's SLI technology, which allows two cards to co-operatively render a single 3D scene. Both chips provide fill DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 support and connect using PCI Express - there is no AGP 8x option.
The 6600 series GPUs are fabbed at 110nm.
Nvidia claims the GT offers a 4bn texels per second fill-rate and can process 375m vertices every second. That translates into real-world figures as Doom 3 frame-rate of 42fps at 1600 x 1200 and 32-bit colour.
As expected, the 6600s won't ship until next month, appearing in stores in boards from the usual suspects in late September. Expect to pay €229/$199 for the GT, less for the vanilla 6600. ®
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