14 DAY TRIAL // The eternal battle between NVIDIA and ATI is yet again reinforced with the arrival of GeForce8800 Ultra video cards. The 8800 Ultra is supposed to be the direct competitor for AMD/ATI's X2900XTX card, but NVIDIA has nothing to worry about as related to high-end cards as of yet. The X2900XTX was postponed again due to technical problems and weak performance yields, giving NVIDIA the possibility to launch their new high-end cards quicker.
ATI should be officially introducing their competitive DirectX 10 lineup (X2900XT) on May 14th. However, this is not to mean that the Canadians will manage a sudden market takeover. One might take into consideration the usual supply lag associated with ATI products, which would clearly result into a several more weeks delay before there is sufficient supply. The initial X2900XT benchmarks that appeared on the Internet a few weeks ago may not reflect how the final products and hardware reviewers will tenaciously put ATI's new cards to serious stress tests before giving their final verdicts. All these issues may eventually hinder ATI's strategic penetration for this graphics segment, while NVIDIA has another card ready to be launched.
NVIDIA's new 8800 Ultra cards look gloomy with their even longer cooler shroud and dark PCB, making it a must-have for enthusiasts who are all about squeezing the last drop of performance from their gaming rigs, albeit careless about the price. Speaking about money and prices, the GeForce 8800 Ultra is said to be featuring a US$829 SRP, but the lack of competition at its official launch time and the limited availability could boost the final prices to around US$999.
Is the Ultra edition really worth all that money? As rumored before, the GeForce 8800 Ultra seems to be an overclocked GTX version. The overall specifications look identical to those of the current 8800 GTX SKU, except three notable modifications: the GPU runs at 612MHz, shader processors at 1500MHz and memory at 2160MHz DDR (up to 103.68GB/s bandwidth). The first impression seems to point out that this card could be the weakest Ultra edition ever released by NVIDIA, as there are already overclocked GTX cards that closely rival the Ultra's specifications.
A series of benchmarks posted on HardwareZone present the 8800 Ultra with a mere 600 point lead in 3DMark 06. It manages between three and nine frames more than the 8800 GTX in Far Cry and five frames or so more in F.E.A.R. In Company of Heroes it manages as much as 18 fps more than the 8800 GTX, but this is hardly impressive for a product that costs more than twice as much as the current cards.