Nvidia Announces Its 8800 Ultra (And the Snoring Begins)

Nvidia has outmaneuvered ATI in the GPU arms race quite consistently over the past two years, adding faster and more powerful parts to its arsenal days or weeks before ATI announces its own latest weapons. That trend continues with today’s announcement of the Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra.

This time, however, the specs for Nvidia’s new silicon leave us underwhelmed: For all intents and purposes, this is little more than a steeply overlcocked 8800 GTX. It has the same number of stream processors as the 8800 GTX (128), the same-sized memory buffer (768MB), and the same-sized memory interface (384-bit).

Aside from the new sheet metal on the dual-slot cooler, Nvidia's 8800 Ultra looks remarkably like its 8800 GTX.

And for the money—a staggering suggested retail price starting at $830—even the clock speeds don’t seem all that impressive: The core on a reference-design card will run at 612MHz (compared to 575MHz on the 8800 GTX), the shaders will be clocked at 1.5GHz (compared 1.35GHz), and the memory will be set at 1.08GHz (compared to 900MHz).

Although Nvidia claims this is all-new silicon, the new part still won’t have the second-generation PureVideo HD engine that’s on the lesser 8600 GPU, which means that the cheaper part will be much more capable in terms of playing Blu-ray and HD DVD movies. Nvidia tells us this doesn’t matter, because anyone buying an 8800 Ultra will surely have a powerful CPU, and so they won’t mind that the Ultra doesn’t offload as much of the decode work from the central processor. But we think you will care that unlike the 8600, the Ultra won’t be capable of displaying those movies at the native resolution of your 30-inch monitor because it doesn’t offer dual-link HDCP decryption.

Nvidia says this will be a limited-production part, and we can see why: Its appeal will likely be limited to those with ultra-deep pockets.