It's been discussed widely ever since, what was it, February? Today NVIDIA is launching its GeForce 8800 Ultra. Now, NVIDIA tried to keep this product as secret as can be, why? Two reasons. First to prevent technical specifications leaking onto the web. Secondly, obviously to change specifications at the last minute. See ATI is releasing their R600 graphics card soon and the Ultra is the product that NVIDIA prepared to counteract it in the market, an allergic reaction to the R600 so to speak. It's fair to say that the leaked R600 info you have seen has some validaty in it and yes, obviously NVIDIA corporate is scratching their heads right now asking what the heck happened with R600? - Guru3D

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra 768MB Graphics Review

The GeForce 8800 Ultra is aactually considered a respin product. This means it's technically similar to the original GeForce 8800 GTX. So then no 196 shader cores or whatever. No my friends we have exactly the same stuff, yet a respin means its core is clocked faster, has faster memory and the 128 shaders processors are clocked faster. So what can we expect from the GeForce 8800 Ultra? As stated already, higher core, memory and shader frequencies thus an accumulated amount of additional performance and good thermals, man look at that new cooler! And a silicon revision lowering the power requirements.

The main differences between the GTX and Ultra, memory was clocked at 1800MHz on the GTX resulting into 86 Gigabyte per second memory bandwidth. This has changed, the memory is now defaulting at 2160MHz, which equals a theoretical bandwidth of 101.3GB/s. So do the math, that's roughly 15% extra bandwidth, which is one of the most limiting factors for a high-end GPU. The memory is still on that weird 384-bit bus. Now then the generic core clock for the GTX is 575MHz. The GeForce 8800 Ultra is at 612MHz. Agreed that's seems a little low, but that is what NVIDIA set to counter the R600.

But one of the most important dimensions of the GPU is the stream processors, which are clocked independently from the rest of the GPU. On the GTX they were clocked at 1350MHz, now on the Ultra we see a 1500MHz stream processor or call it the shader domain clock frequency. On top the two SLI connectors that to date NVIDIA has not explained. The second SLI connector on the GeForce 8800 GTX is hardware support for impending future enhancements in SLI software functionality. So that's either Physics as add-on or two way SLI. With the current drivers, only one SLI connector is actually used.

The GeForce 8800 Ultra is a respin product. It resulted in a slightly optimized Revision A3 core of the GPU build as TSMC and comes with faster clocks. Now from the basic specs you might even say an overclocked GeForce 8800 GTX can do these clocks as well. Very true. If you have proper cooling and a little luck with your GeForce 8800 GTX chances are that you can achieve core clock frequencies like shown today. But the performance increase of the Ultra over the GTX is without a doubt noticeable. And I have to admit, this is a card for a select audience.

Now for those of you that say, I can easily clock my GTX at this speed, that's true as well. But the Ultra can clock up to nearly 690MHz on the core, but we reached near 2500MHz on the memory and had 1728MHz on the shader domain. That's not something you can achieve easily with the GTX. Face it, it's the endless evolution of the technology sector; the everlasting paradox. Yes, the GeForce 8800 Ultra is a very lovely card to own. So we can only end like this, the GeForce 8800 Ultra is a tremendously sexy product; and not a soul on this earth can deny that.