Verdict: This former champion struggles to compete these days.

The GeForce 6800 GT was one of the first GPUs to support Shader Model 3, and was once one of the most sophisticated and high-performance GPUs available. Although it's no longer possible to buy a 6800 GT, we know that a lot of readers still own them, so we thought it would be interesting to see how this former champion copes with modern shader-intensive games.

The 6800 GT has 16 pixel processors, 16 texture processors, eight vertex pipes and 16 ROPs but, unlike the top-end (at the time) 6800 Ultra, the 6800 GT ran at (by today's standards) extremely pedestrian frequencies - just 350MHz for the GPU and 500MHz (1GHz effective) for the 256MB of GDDR3 memory. The reference HSF is a little on the noisy side - if you have two 6800 GTs running in SLI then the noise is highly irritating.

However, despite a respectable complement of pixel processors, the 6800 GT failed to provide a smooth frame rate in any of our three games. The closest it came to achieving our playable minimum frame rate of 25fps was in F.E.A.R. at 1,024 x 768 without any AA or AF, with a score of 23fps. The frame rates in Need for Speed: Carbon and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. were so slow that you'd have to drop the resolution to below 1,024 x 768, and tone down a lot of detail settings to get a decent frame rate. The 6800 GT isn't particularly overclockable either, as the GPU would only run stably at 400MHz and the RAM at 530MHz (1.06GHz effective), although this was enough of a boost to make F.E.A.R. run smoothly at 1,024 x 768.

While the 6800 GT used to be the card that everyone wanted, it simply isn't powerful enough to cope with today's shader-intensive games. It's also much noisier than most modern graphics cards, thanks to its no-frills single slot HSF. As such, it's definitely worth looking around for a new card in which to invest, such as its spiritual successor, the 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS, which is incredible value for money.

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