Geforce 8800 ultra: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra Specs

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IndexThe GeForce 8800 UltraThe TestBattlefield 2 PerformanceThe Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion PerformancePrey PerformanceRainbow Six: Vegas PerformanceS.T.A.L.K.E.R. PerformanceSupreme Commander PerformanceFinal Words

Introduction

NVIDIA owns the high end graphics market. For the past six months, there has been no challenge to the performance leadership of the GeForce 8800 GTX. Since the emergence of Windows Vista, NVIDIA hardware has been the only platform to support DX10. And now, before AMD has come to market with any competing solution whatsoever, NVIDIA is releasing a refresh of its top of the line part.

The GeForce 8800 Ultra debuting today doesn’t have any new features over the original 8800 GTX. The GPU is still manufactured using a 90nm process, and the transistor count hasn’t changed. This is different silicon (A3 revision), but the GPU has only really been tweaked rather than redesigned.

Not only will NVIDIA’s new part offer higher performance than the current leader, but it will introduce a new price point in the consumer graphics market moving well beyond the current $600 — $650 set by the 8800 GTX, skipping over the $700 mark to a new high of $830. That’s right, this new high end graphics card will be priced $230 higher than the current performance leader. With such a big leap in price, we had hoped to see a proportional leap in performance. Unfortunately, for the 38% increase in price, we only get a ~10% increase in core and shader clock speeds, and a 20% increase in memory clock.

Here’s a chart breaking down NVIDIA’s current DX10 lineup:

NVIDIA G8x Hardware
	SPs	ROPs	Core Clock	Shader Clock	Memory Data Rate	Memory Bus Width	Memory Size	Price
8800 Ultra	128	24	612MHz	1. 5GHz	2.16GHz	384bit	768MB	$830+
8800 GTX	128	24	576MHz	1.35GHz	1.8GHz	384bit	768MB	$600-$650
8800 GTS	96	20	513MHz	1.19GHz	1.6GHz	320bit	640MB	$400-$450
8800 GTS 320MB	96	20	513MHz	1.19GHz	1.6GHz	320bit	320MB	$300-$350
8600 GTS	32	8	675MHz	1.45GHz	2GHz	128bit	256MB	$200-$230
8600 GT	32	8	540MHz	1. 19GHz	1.4GHz	128bit	256MB	$150-$160
8500 GT	16	4	450MHz	900MHz	800MHz	128bit	256MB/512MB	$89-$129

We do know NVIDIA has wanted to push up towards the $1000 graphics card segment for a while. Offering the top of the line for what almost amounts to a performance tax would give NVIDIA the ability to sell a card and treat it like a Ferrari. It would turn high end graphics into a status symbol rather than a commodity. That and having a huge margin part in the mix can easily generate additional profits.

Price gaps larger than performance increases are not unprecedented. In the CPU world, we see prices rise much faster than performance, especially at the high end. It makes sense that NVIDIA would want to capitalize on this sort of model and charge an additional premium for their highest performing part. This way, they also get to introduce a new high end part without pushing down the price of the rest of their lineup.

Unfortunately, the stats on the hardware look fairly similar to an overclocked 8800 GTX priced at $650: the EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTX KO ACS3. With core/shader/memory clock speeds at 626/1450/1000, this EVGA overclocked part poses some stiff competition both in terms of performance and especially price. NVIDIA’s G80 silicon revision might need to be sprinkled with magic fairy dust to offer any sort of competition to the EVGA card.

We should also note that this part won’t be available until around the 15th of May, and this marks the first launch to totally balk on the hard launch with product announcement standard. While we hate to see the hard launch die from a consumer standpoint, we know those in the graphics industry are thrilled to see some time reappear between announcement and launch. While hard launches may be difficult, going this direction leaves hardware designers with enough rope to hang themselves. We would love to believe AMD and NVIDIA would be more responsible now, but there is no real reason to think history won’t repeat itself.

But now, let’s take a look at what we are working with today.

The GeForce 8800 Ultra
IndexThe GeForce 8800 UltraThe TestBattlefield 2 PerformanceThe Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion PerformancePrey PerformanceRainbow Six: Vegas PerformanceS.T.A.L.K.E.R. PerformanceSupreme Commander PerformanceFinal Words

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performance overview and gaming performance tests

The GeForce 8800 Ultra video card was released by NVIDIA, release date: May 2, 2007. At the time of release, the video card cost $829. The video card is designed for desktop computers and is built on the Tesla architecture codenamed G80.

Core frequency — 612 MHz. Texturing speed — 39.2 billion / sec. Number of shader processors — 128. Floating point performance — 387.1 gflops. Technological process — 90 nm. The number of transistors is 681 million. Power consumption (TDP) — 171 Watt.

Memory type: GDDR3. The maximum memory size is 512 MB. Memory bus width — 384 Bit. Memory frequency — 1080 MHz. The memory bandwidth is 103.7 GB / s.

Benchmarks

Features

Architecture	Tesla
Codename	G80
Production date	May 2, 2007
Price at first issue date	$829
Place in the ranking	593
Type	Desktop
Core frequency	612MHz
Number of CUDA conveyors	612
Floating point performance	387. 1 gflops
Process	90nm
Number of shaders	128
Texturing speed	39.2 billion/sec
Power consumption (TDP)	171 Watt
Number of transistors	681 million
Video connectors	2x DVI, 1x S-Video
Interface	PCIe 1.0 x16
Length	270mm
Additional power connectors	2x 6-pin
DirectX	10. 0
OpenGL	3.3
Maximum memory size	512MB
Memory bandwidth	103.7 GB/s
Memory bus width	384 Bit
Memory frequency	1080MHz
Memory type	GDDR3
SLI

Chipset GeForce 8800 Ultra — WORLD NVIDIA

90 013 19584

90 012

GPU GeForce 8800 Ultra

Codename 900 02 GPU symbol	G80
Release year	2007
PCI DeviceID GPU bus ID	0194
Computing unit frequency in 3D mode, MHz Frequently the operation of shader processors (SPU) when using 3D functions	1512
Frequency of rendering units in 3D mode, MHz Frequency of rendering units (TMU and ROP) when using 3D functions	612
Transistors, mln. 3	90
Compute Units Number of Shader Processors (SPUs)	128
TMUs TMUs	32
ROPs Number of ROPs	24
Max textures applied per pass	32
GFL Single Precision	580.6
Computational performance, gigaflops Double precision	No0003 Fillrate, without texturing	14688
Scene fill rate, million texels/s Fillrate, with texturing
Video memory type Supported video memory types	GDDR3
Maximum video memory, MB Maximum video memory supported by the GPU	768
Video memory bus width, bits	384
Video memory bus frequency, MHz 900 02 Data bus reference frequency, ½ of DDR	1080
Video memory bus bandwidth, GB/s	103. 7
Bus interface Supported computer buses	PCI Express 1.0a x16
SLI support NVIDIA SLI modes supported by the GPU	SLI, 3-Way SLI
Universal shaders version Maximum version of universal shaders supported ov	4.0
Tesselation Supported tessellation algorithms	No
Cube Environment Maps (CEM)	Yes
Bump mapping Supported bump mapping algorithms	Emboss, DOT3, EMBM ) textures	Yes
Texture compression Supported algorithms texture compression	S3TC, RGTC
Paletted (indexed) textures Indexed color palette texture support	No
Custom sized textures Support for textures with sizes that are not multiples of 2	Yes
9 0002 Maximum texture size, pixels	8192×8192
Depth buffer formats Supported Depth Buffer Formats	Z (16b, 24b fixed, 32b float)
UltraShadow Version Support for NVIDIA UltraShadow 9 technology0003	2. 0
Anisotropic filtering (AF) levels	2, 4, 8, 16
9000 2 Degrees of Full Screen Anti-Aliasing (FSAA)	MSAA RGS 2x, 4x, 8xQ CSAA 8x, 16x , 16xQ
Maximum color depth per channel, bit Internal for 3D rendering	32
Advanced color rendering range (HDR), bit	128
Parallel Rendering (MRT) Render Simultaneously to Buffer#	8
9 0002 MPEG-2 decoding Supported video decoding levels	IDCT, MoComp
WMV decoding Supported video decoding levels	MoComp, PostProc
VC-1 decoding Supported video decoding levels	MoComp, PostProc
H.264 decoding Supported video decoding levels	MoComp_NoFGT
AVC MVC decoding Blu-ray 3D decoding acceleration	No
Dual-Stream Support for decoding two video streams simultaneously	No
Deinterlacing Supported deinterlacing algorithms	PixelAdaptive
Direct3D support version Maximum supported API version	10 .