As expected NVidia announced the new GeForce 6 chipset series today, which will feature the GeForce 6800 Ultra and GeForce 6800 at first. The new chipset features a 16 pipeline architecture, supports the DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 and according to NVidia it will have "eight times the floating-point shader power", "four times the shadow processing power" and "double the vertex processing power" compared to the GeForce FX. There's also this press release with publisher & developer support, and you can find tech demos here. Previews with benchmarks of the Ultra version have been posted on HardOCP, AnandTech, Tech-Report, FiringSquad and Hardware Analysis. So when can you find the new cards in stores? In about a month. The GeForce 6800 Ultra will be $499, the non-Ultra version $299. And yes, NVidia recommends a 480W PSU for the Ultra version of the card.

For now, I think we've established a few things about the NV40 with all of our testing. First and foremost among these is the fact that NVIDIA isn't blowing smoke this time around. Many of our crazy tests in this mega-long review are aimed at exposing weaknesses or just verifying proper operation of the GPU, and the GeForce 6800 Ultra passed with flying colors. The NV40 is exceptionally good, with no notable weaknesses in performance or capability. NVIDIA has caught up to ATI's seminal R300 chip in virtually every respect, while adding a host of new features that make NV40 a better graphics processor, including long shader programs, more mathematical precision, and floating-point framebuffer blends. And it's a freaking titan of graphics performance.