NVIDIA's 8800 Ultra Provides Performance at a Price

Mighty Mouse writes "Hardware review sites across the web have published reviews on NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 Ultra. The response appears to be fairly lukewarm at the moment, mainly thanks to its incredibly high asking price. Bit-tech tested the 8800 Ultra in eight different games at three resolutions, finding it to be on average about 10% faster. TechReport's Scott Wasson reviewed the card using another good selection of games, while HotHardware had the chance to check out SLI performance."

Re:My Wallet hurts reading this one...

[Aladrin]

$200 by itself doesn't mean much. If I could make my car 10% faster for $200, I think that'd be great.

We're talking about 10% faster than a $600 card. (Newegg prices.) So that's 10% for 33% more money. Doesn't sound nearly so bad, now. Factor in that a lot of the price of a device is overhead that doesn't change between cards, and 10% faster is quite a bit more for that amount of money.

Also, don't forget that we're not talking about a card for casual gamers for $50. This is an entire series of cards meant only for those who absolutely have to have the fastest/best card on the market no matter the cost. And they buy 2 of them.

Pointless card

[eebra82]

We all know why NVIDIA would release such a card - considering how soon the R600 is released. Still, giving this card too much attention is pointless. It will exist in very limited quantities and even if you can afford one, you are highly unlikely to find one.

So basically, we are looking at a card only a few hundred will buy.

Re:My Wallet hurts reading this one...

[suv4x4]

10% faster for $200 (+/-)? How's this a deal? For that price it'd better do dishes, too.

It's possible the benchmarks they tried had hit another bottleneck (hardware or software), but either way, the top-range of cards are *all* overpriced and more of a status symbol than a practical purchase.

Anyone buying 8800 today (ultra or not) apparently has money to waste, and if 10% more cost $200, so be it.

Re:My Wallet hurts reading this one...

[jimstapleton]

Top of the line has never had the best price/performance ratio on PC components, to my knowledge, which means spending 33% more for a 10% improvement is very in-line with the way things work.

Not saying it's reasonable or rational, but when you deal with the crowds that have to have the best, and have plenty of disposable income, you can get away with it.

Why Ultra already?

[Murrdox]

I won't be needing an Ultra anytime soon, and I can't see why others would need to either.

I built a brand new system for myself back in November '06, and I put a BFG-Tech 8800 GTX in it.

I love this card. I love it to death. I can throw anything at all at it, and it turns it into pretty rainbows. I run Oblivion and Supreme Commander at the maximum my monitor can support (1920x1200) full everything turned up to the maximum, and the 8800 doesn't even flinch.

Now, if an enthusiast like me needs to build a new system, and didn't buy a 8800 GTX when it came out, and has a lot of money to spend, then maybe that person will jump on this Ultra.

However, considering that there are no games out there right now that can really tax the GTX, why spend more money on an Ultra, when there's nothing out there to really get the extra performance from? If there was a new game out there, and the GTX struggled to give you 35 FPS on, but the Ultra could get you 45... then that might be a performance issue worth looking at. But who is going to be able to tell the difference between 50 FPS and 53 FPS? The difference will be imperceptible.

Just my 2 cents. However, I applaud NVidia for coming out with this, just to make sure they stay on top of the mountain. It shows that they are not resting on the laurels of their recent successes, and are still innovating.

Re:It is a complete RIP OFF!!!

[MBGMorden]

Indeed. When I was in my teenage years, I overclocked the crap out of anything I could get my hands on. I wanted the max speed I could get out of something, and often times given my limited income (my high school job was part-time and netted me maybe $50/week), I often NEEDED to squeeze extra performance out of everything to avoid replacing it or, if it was a new purchase, to get acceptable performance for what little cash I had on hand.

And honestly, I didn't normally have an unstable system back then, it's just that I'd have to sit around doing torture tests, getting the super-duper heatsink paste, researching which chip batch to buy from to get best results, etc.

Somewhere along the line though, I stopped caring so much. I'm almost 26. I have a good job. Yeah I still play PC games, program, and do geeky things, but for the most part - I just buy a reasonably priced component that's "good enough" and don't tinker with it (for example: I'm currently running a Sempron 3400 and a Geforce 7300GT - neither costed too much, and both work just fine for what I need). When it gets too slow I'll buy another "budget" part that will last me another 2 years or so. Yeah I'm spending probably the same money as back then and my systems are comparatively not as fast compared to what's available, but the lack of stress is wonderful.

Re:It is a complete RIP OFF!!!

[Fallen Kell]

But that is just it. The card isn't USER overclocked. It is STOCK (i.e. FULL WARRANTY, SUPPORT, etc., etc.). In other words, no DIFFERENT then what you get when you buy an Ultra. The Ultra itself isn't using a new chip design, new features or anything else. The only difference is that the Ultra uses slightly changed silicone which removes some of the bottle necks they have in terms of making a full run of chips which reach a certain clock speed (i.e. not all chips made on waffer will meet specs for full speed, all chip makers do this, they simply bin the chips which meet spec into different piles and lable them at certain clocks accordingly). The only thing the 8800 Ultra does is bin the chips at Nvidia before they are shipped out to the manufacturers. The card makers themselves have in the past been binning the chips they get and found that many could be run faster then Nvidia said they can.

How do you think we have RAM that range in speeds from DDR2 PC6400 to PC8000 which use the EXACT SAME Micron D9 memory chips?

The difference here is that Nvidia feels they should get the premium cash for the chips instead of selling them to the card makers and letting them figure out if the chip can go faster. While I don't blame them for wanting to do this, Nvidia should have decided to do this with a new line of chips, not an existing line where there are plenty of chips available which already meet the high-end spec speed and have been priced over $180 less then what Nvidia now wants to charge for the same chip.

Re:8800 GTS 320meg

[Aladrin]

It's spelled "it's", moron. Really, if you're going to be anal, check your own post first.

Re:Nvidia keeps releasing Hardware without Drivers

[ASBands]

I understand where you're coming from, but the problem is that they can't just have the computer engineers working on hardware just join up with the people making their software. Sure, there those working on the hardware have to know about the software, but there is always a disconnect between the two teams. Besides, with unified drivers, a fix for the 8800 Ultra will reflect on the GTX and GTS. Releasing a new card is not impeding the development of better drivers, but making them more money to hire more computer scientists to make better drivers (etc.).

Re:My Wallet hurts reading this one...

[Fweeky]

"top-range of cards are *all* overpriced and more of a status symbol than a practical purchase."

Not really; plenty of games struggle even on fairly beefy cards if you want to run them at native resolution on a decent TFT with details turned way up. I spent about £200 on a 512MB 7950GT and it likes to dip into the distracting world of jerkovision in plenty of games in at least some spots, even without full detail. Spending twice as much for 2-3x the performance seems like a pretty good deal to me if you actually have use for the extra power -- it's probably a smarter investment than getting a top-of-the-range CPU which costs 2x as much for a whole 10% extra performance.

Hell, I'm using over £800 worth of monitors, why should spending half that on a card which can do them justice bother me?

"Anyone buying 8800 today (ultra or not) apparently has money to waste, and if 10% more cost $200, so be it."

Well, yes, it's a high end part, and high end parts are generally bought by people with a bit of disposable income or a very pressing need. Still, just because I can easily afford it doesn't mean I'm going to spend it on something I'll barely notice.

Re:My Wallet hurts reading this one...

[Deliveranc3]

This generation is pretty scary fo Nvidia, looks like the 8800 isn't scaling well (No surprise with so many pipelines you need better and better schedulers). And the midrange is slower than the old midrange, and not even close to the old medium-high or high end (Which was the trend for the last 10 years). I think they're scared because the best resolution on most of the older LCDs is 1280x960 and the old 7800 could do that with 16ANx4AA and no one wanted more.

To stay away from this they've been killing the middle and low end, and game makers aren't pushing because they know most people don't want to suffer low framerates again and would rather just have features that perform well and run at 1280.

It used to be that graphics levels increased so fast that in 2 generations (Even with a high end card) you couldn't even PLAY the newest games. I can still play everything with my old machine (AMD 2600+, Radeon 9000Pro) let alone my "new" machine (AMD 2600+, 6600GT). If they want to sell cards they need to push the mid range, and they aren't.

The closest thing they have to the old style is the 8800GTS 320 which is about $350. Trying to DOUBLE the price of the midrange is probably not a smart business move.

We need a third player, it's time.