NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra Review

Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 Ultra continues where the GeForce 8800 GTX left off, extending the company’s performance lead at the top of the discrete graphics market. However, one thing it hasn’t done is to lower the price of Nvidia’s previous flagship GeForce 8800 GTX, which currently retails for anywhere from £360 (inc VAT) a standard clocked version, while pre-overclocked versions of the card start at £365 (inc VAT).

Given that the standard-clocked GeForce 8800 Ultras are expected to cost around £500 (inc VAT), Nvidia’s new flagship part is firmly placed in the exclusive “money is no object” product category. Performance is undoubtedly class leading, but you’re going to have to sell both lungs and your right leg if you want to get hold of one – I don’t even want to contemplate what you’re going to have to sell to get a pair of them.

If there’s one thing we can take from looking at Nvidia’s latest flagship product, it doesn’t appear to be too worried about ATI’s rumoured memory bandwidth advantage, as a result of implementing a 512-bit memory bus on its upcoming R600 graphics processing unit. Nvidia has managed to break through the 100GB per second barrier with its speed-bumped Ultra, which appears to be more than enough bandwidth in all of the scenarios we’ve tested here.

bit-tech