Nvidia ships 'world's fastest' notebook graphics chip

Nvidia today extended its notebook-oriented graphics chip range, adding what it claims is the "world's fastest mobile GPU" to the line-up.

The GeForce Go 6800 Ultra builds on the already-available GeForce Go 6800 by upping the core clock speed. Nvidia didn't put a figure to the core's clock frequency, but it did say the 6800 Ultra can churn out processed pixels at the rate of 5.4bn a second - 50 per cent more than the vanilla 6800's 3.6bn pixels per second score.

The new chip offers a higher vertex processing rate, too, but with only a 20 per cent improvement: 565m vertices per second to the older part's 470m vertices per second.

Both parts run a 400MHz RAMDAC, and support 700MHz DDR and DDR 2 SDRAM, and 1.1GHz GDDR 3 memory. Both offer a memory bandwidth of up to 35.2GBps.

The Go 6800 Ultra supports DirectX 9.0's Shader Model 3.0, along with Nvidia's customary array of trademarked technologies, such as UltraShadow II, Intellisample 3.0, PowerMizer and PureVideo, the company's HD video processing system.

Nvidia's "world's fastest" claim and offer of "performance that is unmatched by any commercially available mobile GPU today" will no doubt be tested by independent reviewers in due course. However, the chip itself is available from today, shipping first in Dell's new Inspiron notebook, the gamer-oriented XPS Gen2. ®

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