Nvidia quietly shipped its latest GeForce 6800 series graphics chip, the GeForce 6800 XT, this week - or, at least, this was the first week anyone else noticed the part was available.

The XT is understood to contain eight pixel pipelines fed by four geometry engines. The core is believed to be clocked at 325MHz, the memory at 350MHz (700MHz effective). Like other 6800 parts, the XT runs a 256-bit memory bus. On the few cards the chip has been seen on, it's connected to 128MB of DDR SDRAM video memory.

The XT comes toward the bottom end of Nvidia's enthusiast-oriented graphics chips, just above the recently and equally quietly released GeForce 6800 LE.

The XT is said to provide a fill rate of 2.6bn texels per second and can churn through 325m vertices per second, compared to the LE's 2.4bn texels per second and 300m vertices per second performance. The LE is clocked at around 325MHz while its memory runs at typically 300MHz (600MHz effective). ®

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