the GeForce 6800 sports a 12-pixel pipeline architecture, with five vertex engines pumping up to 406 million triangles/second (3.9 Gigatexels/sec fill rate). The GeForce 6600 GT features fewer pixel and vertex pipes, but attempts to make up for this by running at much higher clocks, 500MHz on the 6600 GT versus 325MHz on the GeForce 6800.
The real advantage the GeForce 6800 enjoys over the GeForce 6600 GT however is in its memory subsystem.
The GeForce 6800 features a 256-bit memory interface, with four 64-bit memory controllers paired to either 128MB or 256MB of DDR memory running at 350MHz (700MHz effective). This gives the GeForce 6800 up to 22.4GB/sec of peak memory bandwidth, 6.4GB/sec more than GeForce 6600 GT. As a result, the GeForce 6800 really shines against the GeForce 6600 GT at high screen resolutions with anti-aliasing turned on. You saw this a few weeks ago in our EVGA review with 4xAA/8xAF. In multiple cases at resolutions of 1024x768 (and up) the GeForce 6800 card was running 20% faster or more.
