Nvidia fires up GeForce 6600 card

Nvidia has lifted the lid on its latest GeForce 6 Series graphics processing units (GPUs), offering high performance to the mainstream market.

The 6600 GT and 6600 GeForce cards are designed to offer features previously only available on nVidia's flagship GeForce 6800.

These high-end capabilities include support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 and nVidia's UltraShadow II technology.

The company claimed that the GeForce 6600 GT rips through the new Doom 3 first-person shooter at 42 frames per second at high-quality, high-resolution settings.

"Nvidia's latest generation of chipsets gives exceptional performance and feature gains across the entire line, from the consumer cards to the speciality cards," said John Carmack, president and technical director of id Software, in a statement.

"I use a GeForce 6800-class card in my primary workstation, which is the best endorsement I can give."

The eight-pipe superscalar design GPUs also boast a dedicated on-chip video processor designed to bring consumer electronics-quality video to the PC.

In addition, the 6600 GT version incorporates nVidia scan-line interleaving multi-GPU technology, which allows users to run two cards.

The GeForce 6600 and GeForce 6600 GT are expected to be available in late September.