Write your abstract here. Nvidia recently announced the debut of their most powerful graphic card, based on the 8800 Ultra GPU, but don’t hurry to grab one for the moment.
With the clear intention of countering ATI-AMD’s R600 threat, the Ultra 8800 is by far a disappointment when it
comes to performance gain. For $829 you actually get between 10% and 15% more
power compared to the previous generation of cards, the 8800 GTX.
The core architecture for the 8800 Ultra is exactly identical to the one inside 8800 GTX: 128 streaming processors and 768 MB of GDDR3 memory on a 384-bit bus. Even the GPU is built on the same 90nm technology. The only thing Nvidia can boast with at Ultra is the reduced power
consumption (although a few
watts less than an 8800 GTX is not enough to justify the skyrocketing price): the
quoted power consumption for a GeForce 8800 GTX is 177 watts while for the new GeForce 8800 Ultra, running at higher clock speeds, the quoted power consumption is 175 Watts. Considering also that there aren’t yet games fully optimized for this DX 10 monster, and the fact that you also need at least the best dual-core available on the market (if not quad-core, which exceeds the $1000 level), I advise you not to spend your money on an Ultra just yet. Wait until Crysis comes out…