The NVIDIA 8800Ultra is one of the video cards that is going to give ATI a run for their money. Although it's “not available” yet, there have been many things said about it before, and it seems like the information I have is indeed accurate.

Although I don't rule out the usage of other components in the manufacturing process of the NVIDIA 8800Ultra, which would be necessary for the high frequencies the card needs, the model will still be just an upgraded version of 8800GTX. To my disappointment, NVIDIA apparently won't enable all of the assumed 160 stream processors it has, this feature being kept aside, probably for later versions of the G8x series. It seems that Dell has the 8800Ultra graphics card already available for mass shipping on its XPS 710 series of desktop PCs, according to Fudzilla.com. They have caught a glimpse of these video cards and their specifications among the detailed specs of the XPS 710 desktop series.

Shortly after that Dell pulled back the specs, but we still know this: the 8800Ultra has a 650MHz core clock, 768MB GDDR3 memory running at 2160MHz on a 384-bit memory interface, thus giving a 103.68GB/s maximum bandwidth, surpassing, just barely ATI's R600 offering. The video card will still use 128 stream processors, but they’re still talking about the actual performance of ATI's stream processors. By doing the math, ATI seems to be in the zone with their 320 stream processors, but apparently they will run at 740MHz, and compared to the 1350MHz NVIDIA's SPs use, the performance should, again, favor ATI.

I've done the math, and considering NVIDIA's SPs can perform a set of MAD+MUL operations per clock cycle, that means 256 floating point operations per cycle, while ATI's cards, even if they were to perform one operation per clock cycle, they would still perform faster than their counterparts with 320 operations per clock cycle. But, for one, NVIDIA looks way too confident in their products, way too confident I say, and ATI's cards, even though we know of them for so long, haven't been thoroughly examined by a well known hardware website, so, previous results might not be so trustworthy.