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Page 1 of 6  The new GeForce 8800Ultra GPU from nVidia is their fastest ever, but it includes a price premium of around $250 over their 8800GTX range, which is no slouch itself. Today at OzHardware we take a look at the new 8800Ultra and see if the extra cost is justified.
When we look at the specs of the 8800Ultra, it simply looks like an over-clocked 8800GTX, the core of the 8800 Ultra is clocked at 612MHz, up from 575Mhz for the GTX, and the same GDDR3 memory has been clocked up to 1080MHz, up from 900MHz of the GTX. It has the same amount of memory - 768MB, the same 128 stream processors and same 384-Bit memory interface. The additional clock speed of both the GPU core and memory do give a boost to memory bandwidth (103.7GB/s vs. 86.4GB/s) and texture fill rate (39.2billion/s vs. 36.8billion/s), but when comparing a $1200 video card against a $950 video card, is it really that big of a difference? GeForce 8800Ultra  Today we’ll be testing the Gigabyte GeForce 8800Ultra video card and putting it through the standard DirectX 9 tests such as 3DMark06, Quake and Prey, as well as the new DirectX 10 benchmark – Lost Planet. Lost Planet is still in demo form for the PC, as it is currently being ported over from the XBOX 360, but at the time of writing this article it is the only DirectX 10 capable game that has the ability to be benchmarked. GeForce 8800Ultra Connectors  We will be comparing the 8800 Ultra to the 8800GTX, as well as some mid range cards, the 8600GT and 1950Pro, to show real world performance differences. Going on the difference in clock speeds of memory and GPU between the Ultra and GTX, we expect to see around a 5-10% performance increase across the range. The Test Setup: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU ASUS P5N32-E SLI, nForce680i Motherboard Corsair TWIN2X 2GB PC2-8500 Memory Kit (2 x 1GB) Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB SATA-II Hard Drive Antec Basiq 500W ATX Power Supply Windows XP Pro SP2 for DirectX 9 Tests Windows Vista Premium for DirectX 10 Tests
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