As you?ve just seen, NVIDIA?s GeForce 6800 can be easily modified from a 12-pixel pipeline/5 vertex unit mainstream card into a 16-pipe contender with just a few simple clicks of the mouse.
As you?d expect, turning on all of the NV40?s pixel/vertex pipelines brought an immediate performance improvement in all applications we tested. Of course, the performance increase varied depending on the application tested. In Chronicles of Riddick, we saw an improvement of anywhere from 5-8%, with the result varying depending on screen resolution. Far Cry saw even greater benefits, with the 16-pixel/6 vertex unit GeForce 6800 configuration outperforming the 12-pixel/5 vertex GeForce 6800 by 7-10% in the volcano level, with performance in the training map varying between 5-10%. DOOM 3 and Half-Life 2 also saw some pretty good performance gains. Pacific Fighters was really the only title that didn?t benefit from the extra pipelines. Sure, the numbers were a little higher, but well within the margin of error.
...all of our attempts to overclock three different GeForce 6800 vanilla cards were unsuccessful. We were able to easily unlock the pipes on all three cards, but with each of them we could never overclock the graphics core or memory, not even 5MHz. Whether we used RivaTuner to OC the boards or the NVIDIA control panel, each time we tested our settings the GeForce 6800 card would fail to pass the overclocking test. Even if we were able to hit the speeds we achieved in our EVGA e-GeForce 6800 review (400MHz core/810MHz memory), it still wouldn?t have been enough to catch up to say, a GeForce 6800 GT. The GeForce 6800, even with all 16 pixel pipes and 6 vertex pipes running, still gives up too much memory bandwidth to the GeForce 6800 GT to be a 6800 GT killer. The 6800 board?s 128MB frame buffer would also be a huge impediment to catching up to a GT.
