officially launched on August 12, 2004, several months after the launch of the 6800 Ultra. With half the pixel pipelines and vertex shaders of the 6800 GT, and a smaller 128-bit memory bus, the lower-performance and lower-cost 6600 is the mainstream product of the GeForce 6 series. The 6600 series retains the core rendering features of the 6800 series, including SLI. Equipped with fewer rendering units, the 6600 series processes pixel data at a slower rate than the more powerful 6800 series. However, the reduction in hardware resources, and migration to TSMC's 110 nm manufacturing process (versus the 6800's 130 nm process), make the 6600 both less expensive for Nvidia to manufacture and less expensive for customers to purchase.

Their 6600 series currently has three variants: the GeForce 6600LE,the 6600, and the 6600GT (in order from slowest to fastest.) The 6600 GT performs quite a bit better than the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra or Radeon 9800 XT, with the 6600 GT scoring around 8000 in 3DMark03, while the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra scored around 6000, and it is also much cheaper. Notably, the 6600 GT offered identical performance to ATI's high-end X800 PRO graphics card with drivers previous December 2004, when running the popular game Doom 3. It was also about as fast as the higher-end GeForce 6800 when running games without anti-aliasing in most scenarios.

At introduction, the 6600 family was only available in PCI Express form. AGP models became available roughly a month later, through the use of Nvidia's AGP-PCIe bridge chip. A majority of