Date:
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra & SLI

NVIDIA is bringing the name “Ultra” back with today’s launch of the GeForce 8800 Ultra. This new video card pushes the GeForce 8’s performance to new heights, but at $829 is it worth it? We cover single card and SLI performance in Oblivion and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

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System Test Setup

For evaluation we are using an EVGA NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI motherboard, an Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 2.93 GHz processor, and 2GB of Corsair XMS2 Dominator CM2X1024-8888C4D at 4-4-4-12 1T. We are using the latest chipset drivers available and the latest BIOS at time of evaluation.

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Video Card Comparison Setup

There is no point in comparing this video card to any of the current ATI Radeon series. The GeForce 8800 GTX simply owns the battlefield in gaming performance compared to ATI video cards. Instead, we are going to take a non-OC BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTX (running at stock NVIDIA clock speeds) and compare it to the 8800 Ultra. We will see how much faster the Ultra is over the GTX and what benefits it allows in games. We will also test GTX SLI versus Ultra SLI for the same performance comparisons.

We are only going to use two games in this evaluation because quite simply they are the most popular shader intensive games and nearly every other game plays at the highest settings possible on the 8800 GTX. So this evaluation mixes it up a bit from our norm. We will test on a 19” CRT at 1600x1200 doing apples-to-apples, as well as a Dell 24” at 1920x1200 and for SLI we will be using a Dell 30” at 2560x1600. If you are using a monitor with a resolution smaller than those listed, you are likely wasting your money purchasing a video card of this caliber. Make a new display your next upgrade.

Evaluation Setup

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. We use a high performance system, with a very fast CPU in order to remove CPU bottlenecking.

In our graphs we use some abbreviations to indicate the method of AA or AF being used.

TR MSAA = Transparency Multisampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Multisampling quality setting on GeForce 7 and 8 series video cards.

TR SSAA = Transparency Supersampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Supersampling quality setting on GeForce 7 and 8 series video cards.