Nvidia Corp.’s latest high-end offering, GeForce 8800 Ultra, has become available in Japan and the USA, about a week ahead of the original schedule. Availability ahead of the planned date may indicate that Nvidia’s partners have no problems with receiving high-speed components and the new “Ultra” will be broadly available.

Several stores in the U.S. now sell Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra-based graphics cards from BFG Technologies and EVGA at price points starting from $830 per board, according to Shopping.com, Pricewatch.com and PriceGrabber search-engines. Akiba PC Hotline web-site reports that GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics cards from Point of View company are available in Tokyo, Japan for ¥128 000 (approximately $1070).

Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra comes with 128 stream processors, 32 texture mapping units, 24 raster operation units and 384-bit memory bus. The “base” clock-speed of the processor is 612MHz, a 6% increase over previous – GeForce 8800 GTX – flagship offering, while the 128 unified shader processors operate at 1500MHz, which is 11% higher compared to the predecessor. Nvidia equips the GeForce 8800 Ultra with 768MB of GDDR3 memory at 2160MHz, a 20% memory bandwidth boost compared to the predecessor. The GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics cards will use new “A3” revision of the G80 graphics processor, which is believed to have high overclocking potential.

Despite of new chip revision some observers were not sure whether Nvidia will manage to supply the GeForce 8800 Ultra in sufficient quantities due to low availability of GDDR3 memory capable of working at above 2.0GHz clock-speeds. Nevertheless, early availability may be an indicator that the product will be available in commercial quantities and without supply constraints, something which happened to Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX 512 product one and a half years ago.

According to Nvidia itself, performance advantage that the GeForce 8800 Ultra has compared to its predecessor, Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX, is between 10% and 15%. According to X-bit labs’ performance preview of emulated GeForce 8800 Ultra, the newcomer has 2% - 14% performance increase compared to the slower model. Nvidia claims that in some applications the 8800 Ultra may be 27% faster than the 8800 GTX.

It is unclear whether customers will really start to buy the GeForce 8800 Ultra, which comes for 33% higher price compared to the GeForce 8800 GTX amid 2% - 15% performance boost over the latter.