14 DAY TRIAL // With all the fuss of ATI's upcoming series of video cards and all, people have begun turning their attention away from NVIDIA, but these guys don't give up that easy. In order to have something powerful that could still draw the public attention away from ATI, NVIDIA has planned on releasing a new version of the G80 chip, called NVIDIA 8800Ultra. All in all, it should be something with a great deal of interest, or nobody would care.
In this line of thoughts, we have learned that the 8800Ultra card is just a factory overclocked 8800GTX, featuring 128 stream processors and 768MB GDDR3. Even the PCB is the same, the only major modification will be the cooler, which is bigger, and for those of you who need multiple choices, the card manufacturers have two cooler designs to choose from, therefore, users also have the same two choices to make. The adversary 8800Ultra will try to overcome is the ATI Radeon HD 2900XTX, an in doing so the card is expected to have a 650-700 core clock, with yet unknown memory frequencies, but it will still use GDDR3 memories, and seeing as how some manufacturers have already taken the memory frequencies up to 2000MHz on air cooling alone, I'm guessing this could be a good starting point for the 8800Ultra.
This being said, if you have an NVIDIA 8800GTX card, don't go rushing off to buy an R600, just overclock your card to NVIDIA's 8800Ultra level, and you've got it made, cheaper, I would add. In the same line of thought, I was mentioning earlier about Microsoft's decision to "force" users to switch to Windows Vista just so that they could get more money out of the deal, well, I guess I was right. In an interview at www.ign.com, Keita Iida, the Director of Content Management at NVIDIA had a thing or two to say about their products and the reluctance some manufacturers have towards the DX10 concept, or even game developers which have withdrawn features such as anti-aliasing in their products (Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Rainbow Six and Silent Hunter).
Anyway, the point I'm trying to reach was covered in a part of the interview, and you should see this:
Q: "What are your thoughts on Microsoft effectively forcing gamers to upgrade to Vista in order to run Direct X 10 - when there's no real reason why it can't run on Windows XP?"
A: "Keita Iida: It's a business and marketing decision."