The gang over at Gamers Depot have interviewed NVIDIA's Tony Tamasi and Ujesh Desai on the new GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics card which is sweeping review sites these days:

GD: First off, we here at GD are excited about what your new video card holds for gaming performance - can you tell our readers why they should care about the GeForce 6800 series. What does it mean to their gaming experience?

Ujesh: A couple things: First the GeForce 6800 GPUs will deliver amazing performance increases over the current top-of-the line, GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. In fact, on most applications we are seeing, on average, an upwards of a 2x performance increase! The jump in performance is a result of a brand new architecture that includes a superscalar 16-pipe design - a first for a GPU. The GeForce 6800 GPUs also feature native support for Shader Model 3.0, a key feature of DirectX 9.0 that will allow game developers to come up with some very cool new types of visual effects in their next-generation games. What all this means for gamers is they can experience these cutting-edge games at the highest resolutions and fastest frame-rates. You can expect to see games that push the feature set and performance of the GeForce 6 series as early as summer, and definitely by fall.