Over the years NVIDIA has used a wide range of letter combinations and words to designate their products. For instance, many NVIDIA enthusiasts on a budget have flocked to NVIDIA's GT line, starting with the GeForce 6800 GT and a few months later, the GeForce 6600 GT card. Both of these cards dominated their segments of the graphics market thanks to their extraordinary combination of price against performance. While the GT has represented a good mix, the Ultra line has historically been NVIDIA's flagship graphics card. If you asked the average enthusiast, they'd probably tell you the last thing NVIDIA needs right now is a higher-end GeForce 8800 card, but here we are anyway. - FiringSquad

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra Card Performance Review

Born out of the need to compete with the perceived threat of ATI's upcoming R600 GPU, the GeForce 8800 Ultra isn't an all-new graphics chip, it's actually based largely on the same G80 GPU that's already been inside the GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 GTS lines for the past 6 months now. The GeForce 8800 Ultra shares the same basic architectural features as the GeForce 8800 GTX, its got the same number of transistors, the same 384-bit memory interface with 768MB of memory, and the same number of stream processors, the only difference lies in the clock speeds and max power consumption.

Thanks to its tweaked 90nm manufacturing process, the refresh GPU actually consumes slightly less power than the GTX according to NVIDIA. NVIDIA isn't saying much on what's changed with their revised 90nm process, only that they've developed a new silicon revision specifically for the GeForce 8800 Ultra that has been designed to improve the clocks while keeping power to a minimum. On the performance side, the stream processors are clocked faster, while memory bandwidth jumps to over 100GB/sec. NVIDIA has come up with a revised cooling unit for the new card however.

So does the new GeForce 8800 Ultra live up to its Ultra moniker? Ultimately that answer is going to depend on which card you're comparing it to. In the case of the original GeForce 8800 GTX, the GeForce 8800 Ultra represents a nice boost in performance. Of course, keep in mind that the GeForce 8800 Ultra we're looking at today represents the baseline in GeForce 8800 Ultra performance. There's nothing stopping NVIDIA's board partners from producing factory a overclocked GeForce 8800 Ultra card, in fact, many of NVIDIA's board partners plan to do just that at some point.

ATI's R600 is still not around, although it looks like it will be making its debut shortly. Unfortunately we can't elaborate on the performance of this GPU any more than that just yet, but we'll have plenty to say on the subject soon. Until then, the GeForce 8800 Ultra is NVIDIA's fastest new GPU. Is it truly worthy of the Ultra desingation? In stock form, probably not. But we're hoping that in the next few weeks NVIDIA can work with their board partners on getting some highly overclocked GeForce 8800 Ultra boards out the door that are truly worthy of the Ultra name.