NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra Graphics Card

Right after the Internet became abuzz with news that ATI is going to finally launch the long-awaited R600 VPU on May 14th, we expected NVIDIA to launch a preemptive strike. And sure enough, they did that today by launching a new flagship GPU - the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra!

NVIDIA's plan is obvious. By launching a new flagship card less than two weeks before the R600 launch, they are going to steal some thunder from ATI's launch. If the new ATI Radeon HD 2900 flagship card cannot come close to the performance of the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra, then ATI is not only going to lose face but also a lot of business, as the perception will be that, ATI can no longer deliver a competitive graphics solution to challenge NVIDIA's dominance.

While ATI's (and AMD's) future will be revealed when the new ATI Radeon HD X2000-series of graphics cards are launched on May 14th, NVIDIA's new GPU seems designed specifically to tweak ATI's nose and spoil the launch of the R600, rather than a serious attempt to improve the GeForce line-up.

Now, we have all been waiting for a silicon refresh ever since NVIDIA released the G80 GPU. While the G80 was ground-breaking, it was an enormous chip and a really hot one too. Needless to say, we were eager to see a slimmer, more efficient and more powerful version of the G80 GPU, kind of like what the GeForce 79xx series was to the GeForce 78xx series.

Unfortunately, the GeForce 8800 Ultra is not that. The silicon and manufacturing process was merely tweaked to improve timings and clock speeds. The number of transistors remained the same, and so did the size of the chip. Even power reduction was minimal at 2W for the entire board, albeit this was achieved at high clock speeds. In other words, the GeForce 8800 Ultra is nothing more than a faster version of the GeForce 8800 GTX.

But that's still alright. It's always great to see faster cards coming into play, especially if they retain the same level of power consumption and cost. Unfortunately, this is the GeForce 8800 Ultra's greatest flaw. Instead of pricing it to replace the GeForce 8800 GTX, NVIDIA created a new price point at the nose-bleeding altitude of US$829+. If that doesn't kill your appetite for this card, nothing will.

It has been our policy recently to test all graphics cards in Windows Vista. Needless to say, the NVIDIA driver we used was basic and not as optimized as the Windows XP drivers we are used to. Still, we saw pretty impressive benchmark results from the GeForce 8800 Ultra. It beat the GeForce 8800 GTX by 7% to 12% in our test results.

While that is impressive due to the fact that it can beat the GeForce 8800 GTX by a noticeable margin, it is still not enough of a performance lead to justify the incredible new price point. Buying two GeForce 8800 GTS or GTX cards and running them in SLI would give you far better performance (and price-performance ratio) than buying a single GeForce 8800 Ultra.

With that said, we are still impressed with the performance of the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra. Not only is it the fastest graphics card in the market, bar none; it does so with slightly less power consumption than the GeForce 8800 GTX at much higher clock speeds. We wish ATI the best of luck in the upcoming duel.

For more details, read our Comprehensive Review!

MSRP

• $829+

Lowest PriceGrabber Price

• NA

Review

• Comprehensive Review

Manufacturing Process

• 0.09 Micron (90 Nanometers)

Transistor Count

• 681 Million

DirectX Support

• 10

Interface

• PCI Express X16

Stream Processors

• 128

Vertex Shader Version

• 4.0

Pixel Shader Version

• 4.0

Textures Per Clock

• Average 64

ROPs

• 24

Core Clock Speed

• 612 MHz

Shader Clock Speed

• 1500 MHz

Fill Rate

• 39200 MTexels/s

Memory Bus Width

• 384-bits

Memory Size

• 768 MB

Memory Type

• GDDR3

Memory Speed

• 1.08 GHz (2.16 GHz DDR)

Memory Bandwidth

• 103.68 GB/s

DVI Support

• Two dual-linked DVI, both integrated into the GPU