Potential owners of the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra XXX Edition can be confident that their system will tackle any game on the market today at the highest resolutions. The bottom line is that there will always be a high-end market and leading-edge companies like NVIDIA and XFX are in the business of keeping hardcore gamers satisfied. The XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra XXX Edition is based on the GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics processing unit, which was announced by NVIDIA back on May 2nd. At the time, it was mentioned that various launch partners would be offering graphics cards ranging in price from $829 and up when they became available worldwide by May 15th. - nV News

XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra XXX Edition Graphics Review

With the GeForce 8800 having been in production for seven months, continued design and manufacturing improvements began to pay off for NVIDIA and TSMC. In the case of the GeForce 8800 Ultra, the benefits consisted of tangible increases in processor, shader, and memory operating frequencies. The core speed of the reference GeForce 8800 Ultra increased to 612/2160MHz with the shader processor increased to 1500MHz clock speed. This is contrast with the previous flagship the GeForce 8800 GTX that came in at 575/1800MHz with a shader clock of only 1350MHz. With a positive effect on the memory bandwith.

What makes the XXX edition special is that it boasts even higher clock speeds than the reference design, namely 675/2304MHz respectively for core and memory with the shader following at 1674MHz clock speed. The GeForce 8 series was designed as a unified architecture and used as the reference GPU for developing and certifying DirectX 10. The GeForce 8800 Ultra contains 128 stream processors operating at 1.50GHz. Individually, each stream processor is capable of processing information from different types of graphics related programs such as pixel and vertex shaders.

Potential owners of the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra XXX Edition can be confident that their system will tackle any game on the market today at the highest resolutions. However, the same statement also applies to the GeForce 8800 GTX and to a lesser degree the GeForce 8800 GTS, both of which are cheaper that the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra XXX Edition. Although consumers balked at the reference GeForce 8800 Ultra's launch price of $829, a similar situation transpired in November of 2005, when NVIDIA introduced a 512MB version of the GeForce 7800 GTX with a price tag of $759.

NVIDIA surprisingly discovered that they could not keep up with demand and prices for the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB skyrocketed to $800 and up. The bottom line is that there will always be a high-end market and leading-edge companies like NVIDIA and XFX are in the business of keeping hardcore gamers satisfied. Keep in mind that the cost of a product is relative to the disposable income of the consumer that is purchasing the product.