Well, it's springtime here in the United States. The rain is pouring, the trees and flowers are blooming, and as usual NVIDIA is ready with a new product to refresh their existing high-end GPU line up. A few weeks ago we showed you the new mid-range GeForce 8600 GTS, GT and GeForce 8500 GT cards, which expanded NVIDIA's DirectX 10 compatible offerings to include products with price points ranging from $89 all the way on up to $649. But today we've got something for the hardcore enthusiasts among you, and along the way we'll have to revise the upper end of that price range a bit. Yes, the ultimate gaming experience is hitting is with the release of the GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics card. - HotHardware

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra PCI Express Card Review

Despite the fact that their main competition, also knows as AMD/ATI hasn't launched a new product in months and that they don't have a DirectX 10 capable part on store shelves just yet, NVIDIA saw fit to turn the screws add some more virtual horsepower to their ultimate gaming platform. The result is the card we'll be showcasing here today, NVIDIA's new flagship GeForce 8800 Ultra. As we've already mentioned, the GeForce 8800 Ultra doesn't differ all that much from the previous flagship with the GTX suffix from a features point of view. In fact the Ultra version is basically just a higher clocked edition.

The GeForce 8800 Ultra uses what is essentially the same GPU at the GTX, which is built using TSMC's 90nm fabrication processes. With the Ultra, however, NVIDIA has re-spun the chip to allow for higher clock speeds at a similar power budget. In comparison to the GTX, the GeForce 8800 Ultra's core GPU clock speed has been increased to 612MHz, the shader clock has also been increases to 1.5GHz, and the memory clock is up to 2.16GHz. With the increased clocks comes a higher fillrate, better shader compute performance, and of course more memory bandwidth. All of which will improve overall performance.

The GeForce 8800 Ultra represents the current pinnacle of graphics cards on the PC. From its feature set to its performance, and the NVIDIA platform on the whole, there is nothing else available right now that can match it. When NVIDIA announced their nForce 680i SLI and GeForce 8800 series cards and christened them the ultimate gaming platform, they weren't kidding. There is no other gaming platform, including consoles that can offer the features and performance if NVIDIA's current high-end products. And there isn't any real competition yet to go up against the Ultra power.

The news isn't all good, however. NVIDIA has set the pricing of the GeForce 8800 Ultra at an extremely expensive $829. Considering the price of standard GeFore 8800 GTX cards has fallen to about $550 and pre-overclocked GTX cards that will perform similarly to the reference clocked Ultra are available for a only few dollards more, the Ultra doesn't represent a good value. Of course, flagship graphics cards never represent the best value and there has never been a shortage of enthusiasts willing to ride the bleeding edge, regardless of price. Regardless, $829 is an exhorbitant amount of money to spend on graphics card.

NVIDIA has also informed us that some of their partners will be offering factory overclocked GeForce 8800 Ultra cards in the coming weeks that will push its performance even higher, but expect the performance delta that'll separate factory overclocked Utlra's from GTX's to be similar to what we've shown you. In the end, the new GeForce 8800 Ultra is what NVIDIA intended it to be, the most powerful desktop graphics card available, bar none.