Newest GeForce 8 Pushes Performance, Price

Although it is essentially an overclocked version of the Geforce 8800 GTX, Nvidia claims the GeForce 8800 Ultra will outperform its predecessor by a significant margin.

Shortly after expanding its GeForce 8 line on the low-performance end of the spectrum with budget-priced cards, Nvidia is throwing out an offering for the bleeding-edge crowd with the GeForce 8800 Ultra, announced on Wednesday. According to Nvidia, the newest card will be 10 to 15 percent faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX that it replaces as the flagship for Nvidia’s GPU product line.

Specifications for the two cards remain very close. The Ultra will bump the core clock speed up to 612 MHz from 575 on the GTX, the shader clock to 1500 MHz from 1350, and the memory clock to 1080 MHz from 900. It will also feature memory bandwidth of 103.7GB per second and texture fill rates of 39.2 billion per second, up from 86.4 and 36.8 on the GTX, respectively.

The Ultra will retain some features as well. Both cards will have 128 stream processors, 768MB of memory and 384-bit memory interfaces.

Manufacturers for the GeForce 8800 Ultra will include Asus, BFG, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision, Leadtek, MSI, PNY, Point of View, Sparkle and XFX. The cards will be available to the public on May 15, but be prepared to pay – prices will start at $829.