by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov
06/19/2007 | 11:12 AM
It was known even before the official announcement that the Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra, a premium-class graphics card solution, would be an overclocked version of GeForce 8800 GTX. Developing a more advanced GPU, even based on the existing G80, would have been a slow, expensive and hardly worthwhile undertaking considering that such graphics cards amount for but a tiny share of the market of discrete desktop graphics. There had been precedents, too. We can recall the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 and the older GeForce 2 Ultra and GeForce 3 Titanium as examples.
<%BANNER[article]%>So, the GeForce 8800 Ultra was supposed to come with the same GPU as its predecessor and the only arguable things were the frequencies, the possibility of using a new PCB (as it had been the case with the GeForce 7800 GTX 512), the use of an improved cooling system, and the installation of fast GDDR4 memory. Some people named core frequencies of 650-700MHz and a memory frequency of 2000MHz and higher and a price of $999, but what do we have in the end?
The GeForce 8800 Ultra uses a total of 768MB of GDDR3 memory, the same memory amount as is installed on the GeForce 8800 GTX. The GPU frequency is only 612MHz for the main domain and 1.5GHz for the shader processor domain, i.e. 6% and 11% higher than those of the GeForce 8800 GTX. The memory frequency has increased from 1800MHz to 2160MHz – the biggest frequency growth of the new card.
The GeForce 8800 Ultra was supposed to be a preemptive strike on AMD prior to AMD’s release of the R600 chip and graphics cards with it. This strike was indeed made on May 2, some time after the announcement of the new mainstream solutions, the G84 and G86 chips, but our tests of a GeForce 8800 GTX overclocked almost to the level of the GeForce 8800 Ultra showed a small performance gain, from 2% to 14%. Besides, AMD launched its counterattack in other market sectors and the new card from Nvidia found no opponent to compete with. The Radeon HD 2900 XT with a recommended price of $399 was made a rival to the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB, which was quite a different price range.
The GeForce 8800 Ultra is a bit of a disappointment, actually. People had hoped for something more, especially as many of Nvidia’s partners had long been offering pre-overclocked GeForce 8800 GTX with parameters very similar to the new card’s. Some of such cards were described in our article called The Invincibles: GeForce 8800 GTX Roundup. Nvidia did not introduce anything new. It just rolled out a luxurious product priced at $829 and targeted at a lean group of enthusiasts that strive to have maximum possible performance regardless of the price.
Anyway, the GeForce 8800 Ultra is undoubtedly the fastest gaming graphics card today and deserves our interest for this fact alone. Our preliminary tests were performed by emulating the new card, but now we’ve got an opportunity to test the original in our traditional selection of gaming and synthetic tests. We are about to review the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra 768MB DDR3 Extreme.
The product comes packaged into a medium-sized box designed in XFX’ traditional austere style with a minimum of design extravaganza.
Some design elements, like the werewolf’s mask, are glossy and look very effective on the matte background, matching the exquisite nature of the product contained in the box. Although XFX offers three versions of GeForce 8800 Ultra differing in clock rates, there is no mention of the particular model on the front or rear panel of the box. This may be somewhat confusing for the buyer. There is only a sticker on the bottom of the box that tells you the model name as well as the ordering code, “PV-T80U-SHD9” in our case. This should mean the fastest version of GeForce 8800 Ultra offered by XFX, with the XXX index. According to the official XFX website, its GPU should be clocked at 675/1667MHz and its memory, at 1150 (2300) MHz. The real frequencies of our card are not such, as you’ll see shortly. Our sample proved to be a copy of the less fast Extreme version.
The box is surprisingly stout for its dimensions, perhaps due to the manufacturer’s desire to protect the card as much as possible during transportation and storage. There is another box, made from thick corrugated cardboard, inside the external one and it is filled up with foam rubber except for a small compartment with accessories. The card lies snugly in a tray, wrapped into an antistatic pack. It is covered from above with one more sheet of foam rubber. The accessories compartment contains the following:
There are no power adapters among the accessories. This might be a cause for worry with the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB, but the person who buys such an expensive graphics card as GeForce 8800 Ultra has surely taken care to have a modern PSU with a couple of 6-pin or even 8-pin PCI Express connectors.
The manual included into the box is very simple but offers instructions about how to install the card into the system, recommendations on organizing proper ventilation in your system case and information on the compatibility of different mini-DIN connectors you can use for an analog connection to a TV-set.
So, the packaging and accessories of the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme are good. The box looks attractive and protects the card from damage effectively while the accessories include everything you may want to use the graphics card normally. An additional point in favor of the card is the included copy of the popular tactical shooter Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter .
The GeForce 8800 Ultra seems to differ greatly from its precursor GeForce 8800 GTX, but it is only an outward appearance created by the modernized cooling system whose casing covers the entire card and makes it look massive. The card uses the same PCB design as the GeForce 8800 GTX, actually:
This is reasonable on the Nvidia part since developing a new PCB or modifying the old one would have required large money and time expenditures. Considering that the GeForce 8800 Ultra is based on a new-revision G80 chip with somewhat reduced power consumption, the use of the PCB from the GeForce 8800 GTX is justifiable. So, the two cards are absolutely identical save for the revisions of the GPU and NVIO chips.
Like the rest of the GeForce 8800 family, the GeForce 8800 Ultra is manufactured at Foxconn’s or Flextronics’ facilities and is shipped ready-made to Nvidia’s partners. The GeForce 8800 Ultra will be probably coming out with a black solder mask that endows the card with an exquisite and expensive appearance.
The snapshot shows that this is indeed the new A3 revision of the G80 chip. All other GeForce 8800 that we’ve ever dealt with in our labs carried revision A2 chips. Our sample of the GPU was manufactured on the seventh week of 2007, somewhere in mid-February. Besides a better frequency potential, the new revision features lowered power consumption. This is in fact the single difference in the end user’s eyes. The reduction of the power draw was not too urgent because the G80 looked modest against the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT with the latter’s power consumption of 160W. Our measurements showed that neither of the three +12V channels of the GeForce 8800 GTX carried a load of higher than 43-45W. The reduced power draw will help the GeForce 8800 Ultra keep within the predecessor’s limits despite the increased clock rates.
The GPU being the same, its configuration hasn’t changed, either. The A3 revision G80 chip incorporates 128 unified stream processors capable of executing any type of shaders, 32 TMUs with one address unit and two filters units per each, and 24 raster operators.
According to the ordering code on the box, our sample of XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra belongs to the XXX series that has the highest clock rates of all the versions of the Ultra offered by XFX, but the card’s real frequencies differ from what the manufacturer website declares. The GPU core frequency is 648MHz as opposed to the specified 675MHz while the shader processor frequency is 1620MHz as opposed to the specified 1667MHz. These numbers are in between the XXX and Extreme versions, the latter having officially specified GPU frequencies of 650/1605MHz.
We have an official explanation of this discrepancy from XFX. Our test lab received an early sample of XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra XXX clocked at frequencies that correspond to the current version of XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme. Thanks to a careful selection of cards the company could make the XXX and Extreme series operate at higher frequencies than had been planned originally and our sample is in fact an XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme rather than an XXX. We should note that the card would heat up greatly even at 648/1620MHz and its cooler could hardly cope with it in the summer heat. According to RivaTuner, the GPU temperature was never lower than 90°C under load.
A more interesting point of difference is that the PCB carries unique memory, Samsung K4J52324QE-BJ08. This memory is not yet even mentioned on the manufacturer’s website. According to the official documentation, the fastest chip in this series is suffixed “BJ1A” and works at a frequency of 1000 (2000) MHz and 1.0V voltage. So, these are completely new chips with an access time of 0.8 nanoseconds and capable of working at a frequency of 1250 (2500) MHz. It is the first time GDDR3 memory has such speed characteristics that have hitherto been available with GDDR4 chips only. Such chips cannot be cheap and the GeForce 8800 Ultra must owe its high cost to this very factor largely.
The memory chips do not work at their rated frequency on the GeForce 8800 Ultra. This may be the reason why their voltage is lowered, probably from 1.9V to 1.8V. The lower voltage leads to lower power consumption, too. The chips are clocked at 1134 (2268) MHz, which roughly corresponds to the specified memory frequency of the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra XXX, 2.3GHz. With a 384-bit memory bus this frequency ensures a bandwidth of 108.8GB/s, somewhat higher than the memory bandwidth of the Radeon HD 2900 XT that has a 512-bit bus but a much lower memory frequency. The total amount of graphics memory on board the GeForce 8800 Ultra is 768MB, just like on the GeForce 8800 GTX.
Nvidia equipped the GeForce 8800 GTX with a highly efficient cooling system, quiet and capable of dissipating over 130 watts of heat. We gave you a detailed description of the cooler in our theoretical review of the GeForce 8800 architecture.
The developer took steps to decrease power consumption of the GeForce 8800 Ultra, so the card might have been equipped with the same cooler, but Nvidia decided different and modified it to some extent.
The main difference is that the fan is positioned outside the PCB, perhaps for the purpose of taking air in more efficiently. The fan can now take air not only from below, but also from above through the hole in the cooler’s base. The casing is now as long as the card itself, although there are no additional air-ducts inside it and the whole stream of air is still directed to blow at the heatsink. The rear-part elements do not actually need any cooling, but the new casing covers them, too. Considering the length of the card, you may have problems installing your GeForce 8800 Ultra on certain mainboards. For example, it may block the mainboard’s Serial ATA ports or press against some mainboard elements with its casing.
Otherwise, the cooler’s design has remained unchanged. Its copper sole contacting with the GPU die transfers heat to the aluminum heatsink via heat pipes, and a fan is set to blow at the heatsink. There are two heat pipes here: a flat U-shaped one is pressed into the cooler’s base while another, round, pipe carries the heat over to the remote part of the heatsink. The heatsink has remained almost the same size as on the GeForce 8800 GTX.
Hot air is exhausted outside the system case through the slits in the card’s mounting bracket. Other hot components, like the NVIO processor, memory chips and power circuit elements, give their heat to the aluminum frame the rest of the cooling system is mounted on. The frame has juts opposite the components it is supposed to cool. A proper thermal contact is ensured by means of non-organic fiber pads soaked in white thermal grease.
A 5.8W Delta BFB1012L blower on ball bearings is used here, the same fan as in the GeForce 8800 GTX cooler. It uses a 4-pin connection and can be controlled using pulse-width modulation. Having dealt with a lot of GeForce 8800 cards, we are sure the noise parameters of the GeForce 8800 Ultra cooler are going to be within reasonable limits since it has inherited all the features of the GeForce 8800 GTX cooler, which is surely the best of modern stock graphics card cooling systems.
We measured the level of noise produced by GeForce 8800 Ultra with a digital sound-level meter Velleman DVM1326 using A-curve weighing. At the time of our tests the level of ambient noise in our lab was 36dBA and the level of noise at a distance of 1 meter from a working testbed with a passively cooled graphics card inside was 43dBA. We got the following results:
Quite expectedly, the modified cooler is almost as noisy as the cooler of the GeForce 8800 GTX. The graphics card has comfortable noise characteristics despite its belonging to the Ultra High-End class.
An overclocked version of GeForce 8800 Ultra, like the XFX card we are describing here, may overheat and cause hang-ups in hot weather and in a poorly ventilated system case, so you should follow XFX’ recommendations on organizing proper airflows inside your computer. You also should not save on additional system fans. If these rules are complied with, the card will please you with its quiet and stable operation. And if you are going to overclock your GeForce 8800 Ultra, you will certainly need a more advanced cooling solution, perhaps a liquid cooling one.
Unfortunately, we could not measure the graphics card’s power consumption because it refused to run on our testbed based on an Intel Desktop Board D925XCV. Users of modern mainboards are unlikely to encounter this problem, yet you may want to make sure beforehand that the GeForce 8800 Ultra is compatible with your system before you make such an expensive purchase.
To test the performance of XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme we assembled the following standard test platform:
Since we believe that the use of tri-linear and anisotropic filtering optimizations is not justified in this case, the AMD and Nvidia graphics card drivers were set up to provide the highest possible quality of tri-linear and anisotropic texture filtering. We have also enabled transparent texture filtering to achieve best image quality by selecting Adaptive antialiasing in AMD Catalyst and Transparency antialiasing in multisampling mode of Nvidia ForceWare drivers. As a result, our settings looked as follows:
ATI Catalyst:
Nvidia ForceWare:
We selected the highest possible graphics quality level in each game using standard tools provided by the game itself. The games configuration files weren’t modified in any way. Performance was measured with the games’ own tools or, if not available, manually with Fraps utility version 2.8.2. We also measured the minimum speed of the cards where possible.
We performed tests in 1280x1024/960, 1600x1200 and 1920x1200 resolutions. The games that didn’t support 16:10 ratio were run in 1920x1440 resolution. We used “eye candy” mode everywhere, where it was possible without disabling the HDR or Shader Model 3.0. Namely, we ran the tests with enabled anisotropic filtering as well as MSAA 4x. We enabled them from the game’s menu. If this was not possible, we forced them using the appropriate driver settings of Catalyst and ForceWare.
XFX GeForce 800 Ultra Extreme will be competing against the following graphics accelerators participating in our test session:
For our tests we used the following games and benchmarks:
First-Person 3D Shooters
Third-Person 3D Shooters
RPG
Simulators
Strategies
Synthetic Benchmarks
The GeForce 8800 Ultra, in either version, does not have any advantage over the GeForce 8800 GTX in the standard 4:3 resolutions. There is a small growth of the minimum speed, from 83-85 to 86-90fps, which cannot have any effect on your gaming experience.
The GeForce 8800 Ultra gains a bigger advantage in the most resource-consuming 1920x1200 mode, mostly due to the increase in the memory bandwidth, but this still has no effect on your gaming comfort because the ordinary GeForce 8800 GTX delivers enough performance even at 1920x1200 with enabled full-screen antialiasing.
The CPU does not limit the speed of the graphics subsystem even in low resolutions, yet it is clear that the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme is just slightly better than the standard model of the same card with the official frequencies. Anyway, the new card is not far better than the GeForce 8800 GTX and delivers good performance in resolutions up to 1600x1200 as well.
The min speed is insufficient for comfortable play at 1920x1200. By the way, the GeForce 8800 Ultra is ahead of the Radeon HD 2900 XT in the highest resolution, but the gap is a mere 2fps.
Despite the old age of this game, the difference between the GeForce 8800 GTX and both versions of GeForce 8800 Ultra can be seen even at 1600x1200. It is not critical, though, considering that the average frame rates are over 100fps and the min speeds are over 70fps.
Note that the Radeon HD 2900 XT is ahead of the GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra in terms of minimum speed at 1280x1024 resolution and has a higher average frame rate than the GeForce 8800 GTX at 1920x1200 due to the 512-bit memory bus.
The outcome of this test largely depends on the GPU’s computing power. As you can see, the Radeon HD 2900 XT with its super-scalar design and a total of 320 ALUs is always ahead of the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme in both minimum and average speeds, but this doesn’t mean any problems for the gamer. The worst result in Far Cry comes from the Radeon X1950 XTX at 1920x1200 with enabled 4x multisampling, but it is as high as over 90fps with occasional slowdowns to 45fps.
Our turning on the FP HDR mode has a negative effect on the Radeon HD 2900 XT. The only thing it can do now is to surpass the GeForce 8800 GTS on the Research map. This is the natural outcome of its lower performance of texture and raster processors.
The GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 Ultra are the winners here. But like in the earlier tests the latter shows no miracles that would justify its high price. The same goes for the overclocked version from XFX.
This is the first time that the GeForce 8800 Ultra is really worth its official price of $829. It is the only single graphics card capable of delivering 60fps at 1920x1200, thus ensuring comfortable gaming conditions. To remind you, you need an average frame rate of 60fps and a minimum speed of 25-30fps to play a dynamic first-person shooter with comfort. Both versions of GeForce 8800 Ultra comply with the latter condition, too.
Using the deferred rendering technique, this game is incompatible with full-screen antialiasing. There are only anisotropic filtering results here.
All the display resolutions we use in this test session are available for normal play on the GeForce 8800 Ultra as well as on the GeForce 8800 GTX. Perhaps the full potential of the new card from Nvidia will only be revealed at extremely high display resolutions like 2560x1600, and we’ll check this out in one of our upcoming reviews that will be dedicated to Ultra High-End single-chip solutions as well as to the most powerful Nvidia SLI and AMD CrossFire tandems.
Everything we’ve said above is true for Half-Life 2: Episode One , too. The XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme brings you performance benefits in high resolutions only – the speed gain is 9-12%. This doesn’t matter much considering that the average frame rate is over 110fps – the gamer just won’t feel any difference.
The XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme ensures an increase in the average performance over the GeForce 8800 GTX, which is only valuable at a resolution of 1920x1200 or higher. Otherwise, there is no reason why you should prefer the more expensive Ultra to the much cheaper GTX especially as there are pre-overclocked versions of the GTX card that offer greatly increased performance.
The game doesn’t support FSAA when you enable the dynamic lighting model, but loses much of its visual appeal with the static model. So, we benchmarked the cards in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. using anisotropic filtering only.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is the second instance in our today’s tests when the increased frequencies of the GeForce 8800 Ultra bring you a tangible profit, although not as big as in F.E.A.R. Extraction Point . Here, this additional speed won’t be superfluous even in 1600x1200, especially when you play the game on the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme. We don’t say that you won’t have comfortable gameplay on the GeForce 8800 GTX, yet the GeForce 8800 Ultra can give you somewhat more confidence in the Zone.
Note that the Radeon HD 2900 XT performs poorly despite the use of AMD Catalyst 7.5. It is still slower than the ex-flagship Radeon X1950 XTX.
The standard GeForce 8800 Ultra is up to 10% faster than the standard GeForce 8800 GTX, and the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme increases this advantage to 16%. This has no practical value, however, for a third-person shooter unless you switch to an extremely high display resolution. The resolution of 1920x1200 is becoming more widespread considering the arrival of rather inexpensive 24” monitors.
The XFX card is not even 10% faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX, but both of them, together with the standard GeForce 8800 Ultra, deliver excellent performance in all the common resolutions. They are unrivalled, actually. The Radeon HD 2900 XT occupies a different market niche where it is successfully competing with the GeForce 8800 GTS, losing to it in high resolutions a little.
We try to get the best quality of graphics from each game, so we chose HDR in favor of FSAA and benchmarked the cards with anisotropic filtering only.
The XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme enjoys a 14% advantage now, yet it does not give you any tangible gaming benefits in comparison with the GeForce 8800 GTX. In other words, why should you buy the $829 card if the $599 one is just as good for the job?
The current version of Gothic 3 does not support FSAA, so we benchmarked the cards using anisotropic filtering only.
The XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme is almost 20% ahead at 1920x1200, but the increase in minimum speed, amounting to 40%, is even more important for the gamer. Well, the game runs quite smoothly on the GeForce 8800 GTX, too, but the GeForce 8800 Ultra can give you some extra reserve of speed for the most action-heavy scenes.
The game’s support for HDR is still deficient. Therefore we tested the cards at the eye candy settings with 4x FSAA.
Like in the previous tests, the GeForce 8800 Ultra (in any version) does not push the performance bar up to the next level, yet ensures an additional reserve of speed. There is little use from it at resolutions below 1920x1200, and the GeForce 8800 GTX can be said to run the game normally even at 1920x1200, considering the game’s specifics, but the increase of the min speed from 20-21fps to 24-26fps can make the gameplay smoother.
The game looks much worse without HDR (although this is an arguable point), so we test it with enabled FP HDR.
We’ve got the same thing again: the GeForce 8800 GTX ensures a comfortable level of performance in every resolution, but the GeForce 8800 Ultra proves to be faster still. The standard model and the XFX version enjoy an advantage of 7% and 11%, respectively, at 1920x1200. This is not a critical advantage, yet having a higher speed can’t be bad. Let’s check out the open scenes of the Oblivion world which are more difficult for the graphics card to deal with.
Here, the overclocked GeForce 8800 Ultra provides a 10% growth in the average frame rate. The minimum speed is increased by an impressive 34% which may come in handy in graphically complex scenes because the 30 frames per second provided by the GeForce 8800 GTX is barely above the minimum comfortable level while 38-41fps is a certain reserve of speed.
There is almost no difference between the GeForce 8800 GTX and the two versions of GeForce 8800 Ultra in this test. Each of them copes with the game well in any of the standard resolutions notwithstanding the use of full-screen antialiasing.
The game having a frame rate limiter, you should consider the min speeds of the cards in the first place. This parameter determines your playing comfort in Command & Conquer 3 .
The difference is smaller than in X3: Reunion even. It is almost missing altogether. And it does not matter whether you run the game on a standard or overclocked GeForce 8800 GTX, or on any GeForce 8800 Ultra, or even on a Radeon HD 2900 XT, as each of these graphics cards will ensure maximum playing comfort in this highly popular strategy game.
We tested the game in the pure speed mode with enabled anisotropic filtering only, because it has problems when you turn on FSAA.
The overall picture resembles what we have seen in the open scenes of TES IV: Oblivion . There is no strong need to use such an expensive solution as GeForce 8800 Ultra even for 1920x1200 resolution, but you’ll have some additional reserve of minimum speed if you’ve got this card.
Unfortunately, the Radeon HD 2900 XT still has a very low minimum of speed despite the new version of Catalyst: there is little playing comfort when the game speed occasionally plummets from 75-120fps down to 13fps.
The numbers are indicative once again that the formidable processing power of the GeForce 8800 Ultra is not actually called for in resolutions below and including 1920x1200. The best you can achieve is a 9-14% bonus to the average speed. Considering that the average speed is as high as 53-60fps and the minimum is 42-46fps, this bonus doesn’t mean anything for an RTS.
Neither version of GeForce 8800 Ultra cannot notch a score higher than 18.000 points and overtake the Radeon HD 2900 XT. This is no record-breaking performance, but let us check out the results of individual tests.
It’s all logical here: the three most advanced graphics cards are ranked up in order of their technical capabilities except for the lowest resolution in the first test where such solutions as GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra are limited by other factors.
Interesting to note, the Radeon HD 2900 XT cannot get close to the senior GeForce 8800 models in any of the three tests. Moreover, it is everywhere slower than the GeForce 8800 GTS notwithstanding its efficient memory controller with a 512-bit external memory bus. It is either the driver for the new series is still faulty (this is indicated by the test results in some games) or the AMD card suffers from a lack of texture and, especially, raster processors.
Anyway, the higher overall score of the Radeon HD 2900 XT is not confirmed by the results of the individual tests under real gaming conditions. It is the GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 Ultra that are the real winners of 3DMark05.
The results are more realistic in 3DMark06: the Radeon HD 2900 XT is a little slower than the GeForce 8800 GTX while both versions of GeForce 8800 Ultra score over 11.000 points.
The GeForce 8800 Ultra is in the lead in both groups of tests at its default as well as overclocked frequencies whereas the GeForce 8800 GTX scores 154 points less than the Radeon HD 2900 XT in the SM3.0/HDR tests. Thus, the GeForce 8800 Ultra is the only supreme leader in all the 3DMark06 categories, at least at the default settings.
The Radeon HD 2900 XT falls far behind the GeForce 8800 GTS in both SM2.0 tests. The senior GeForce 8800 models are ranked according to their technical characteristics, from the GTX to the overclocked Ultra. The standard GeForce 8800 Ultra with default frequencies outperforms the GeForce 8800 GTX by about 10%. The XFX version enjoys a 14-15% advantage.
The overclocked frequencies of the XFX card bring it no benefits in the first SM3.0/HDR test where it is exactly as fast as the ordinary GeForce 8800 Ultra. Performance seems to be limited by the memory bandwidth here. There is no such limitation in the second, less demanding, test and the graphics cards are ranked in their usual order, but the gap between the GeForce 8800 GTX and the GeForce 8800 Ultra is bigger than between the GeForce 8800 Ultra and the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme. This is also the single test where the Radeon HD 2900 XT is close to the GeForce 8800 GTX.
So, GeForce 8800 Ultra deserves the title of today’s fastest gaming graphics accelerator. However, we have also confirmed the results of our preliminary testing that we carried out some time ago: the advantage of GeForce 8800 Ultra over GeForce 8800 GTX may vary from a few percent to 20%, but on average equals 8%-15%. We have detected only two cases when the performance gain from GeForce 8800 Ultra can bear real practical value for a gamer: F.E.A.R. Extraction Point and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl , both tested in 1920x1200 resolution.
In a few other games, such as Prey , Gothic 3 or Neverwinter Nights 2, we can claim that this solution features some performance reserve that may be efficient again in 1920x1200 resolution. GeForce 8800 Ultra may reveal its advantages even better in higher resolutions like 2048x1536 or 2560x1600, but there are very few monitors that can handle resolutions like that and they are pretty expensive. Nevertheless, we are going to check this out in one of our next articles.
All in all, GeForce 8800 Ultra could be a disappointment for an end-user, because it doesn’t boast any significant advantages over the GeForce 8800 GTX except for a few individual cases described above, but costs considerably more. Nevertheless, the solution is still the today’s fastest single-card gaming solution, so Nvidia did successfully strengthen its positions as the manufacturer of world’s fastest gaming accelerator. They have also demonstrated that their technical potential is sufficient to raise the frequency of such complicated chip as G80 without pushing its power consumption beyond acceptable limits – something former ATI Technologies failed to achieve with their R600. Anyway, Nvidia did attain their primary goal: to prove their technology leadership in the consumer 3D market.
As for XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme, this is undoubtedly a high-end product for those who need to get maximum gaming performance at any price, despite the cost of solutions like that. Thanks to higher clock speeds, this card is slightly faster than the standard GeForce 8800 Ultra in gaming tests, but this performance advantage is practically the same as that of GeForce 8800 Ultra over the GeForce 8800 GTX counterpart, or maybe even smaller than that.
XFX currently has an even faster GeForce 8800 Ultra modification with XXX index, but it will hardly be able to significantly outperform GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme. In any case, if you are one of computer gaming enthusiasts and do not care as much about the financial side of the picture as you care about the performance, then XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme is certainly your best choice. Moreover, with two cards like that working in SLI mode you will immediately achieve unprecedented gaming performance. But be prepared to pay about $1500 for that. Also check that your system case can accommodate two graphics cards like that and ensure proper airflow for efficient cooling.
Highs:
Lows: