IT infrastructure distributor, Axiz, has announced the availability of the Gainward Geforce 6800 Card. Classified as part of the Geforce 6 Series of cards, the Geforce 6800 is the next generation of graphics cards aimed at the high level gaming enthusiast.

The Geforce 6800 series is designed to deliver industry-leading 3D performance - new superscalar 16-pipe architecture delivers more than twice that of Nvidia GPUs; new features, including Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 feature set for ultra-realistic cinematic effects; and an on-chip video processing engine, which enables high-definition video and DVD playback.

"This is the biggest generation-to-generation performance leap," says Philip Henning, graphics product manager, Axiz. "In addition to the raw performance increase, Nvidia has taken programmability to the next level with the industry's only GPU with Shader Model 3.0, as well as extending the reach of GPUs to the consumer electronics market with a powerful and fully programmable video processor."

The innovative 3D graphics architecture of the GeForce 6800 GPUs introduces many new technologies that will drive the image quality and performance in 3D gaming.

With a revolutionary new 16 pipeline superscalar architecture and the world's fastest GDDR3 memory, GeForce 6800 GPUs offer a staggering amount of graphics horsepower. Gaming performance is super charged with eight times the floating-point shader power, four times the shadow processing power and double the vertex processing power over last generation's GeForce FX architecture.

Built with full Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 support, the GeForce 6 Series was built to deliver ultra-realistic next-generation DirectX 9 titles.

The GeForce 6800 GPUs give developers unlimited programmability, 32-bit shader precision, displacement mapping, geometry instancing and other features unique to the GeForce 6 Series. In addition, this new GPU delivers full floating point support throughout the entire pipeline, GeForce 6800 GPUs vastly improve the quality of images in motion with floating point filtering. The new rotated-grid anti-aliasing feature removes jagged edges for incredible image quality and a new 16x anisotropic filtering mode adds clarity to textures.

GeForce 6800 GPUs have a programmable on-chip video processing engine that delivers stunning high-definition video playback. Featuring support for MPEG encode and decode, as well as support for Windows Media Video 9 (WMV9), the GeForce 6800 delivers an amazing video experience when used with the Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition operating system. The GeForce 6800 also enables high-quality video playback on any window size, and has an integrated TV-encoder for direct-to-TV playback.

For more information contact Philip Henning, Axiz, 011 237 7000, philiph@axiz.co.za, www.axiz.com