NVIDIA's 8800 Ultra - Pimp my 8800GTX
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 02 May 2007

With R600 "appearance" on the market soon enough, NVIDIA decided to do a face-lifting to the high-end segment, as well. The product on steroids is called 8800 Ultra and that makes the first appearance of the "Ultra" name after quite awhile (back since the 6800-series days). God, has it been that long? Ah well, the good old days... Anyway, stay with us while we take you through a technology/performance overview of this latest addition to the NVIDIA's VGA product line. You can check how it looks in our testing machine here.

Let's go a couple of years back to 6-series days and work our way up. 6800 Ultra was actually the last time this "Ultra" thing appeared in one of NVIDIA's graphic cards. In chipsets, that's a different story. With 256-bit memory interface (yep, even in those good ol' days), 512MB of memory, 35.2 GB/s memory bandwidth and peaking at 16 pixels per clock/textures per pixel, this was one hell of a card at its time. It was produced in 130nm process, supported PureVideo technology, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Interestingly enough, if you check out the Geforce 6 Series Product overview, you can see this "thing" on the second page - it's actually mentioning S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl. Now we really wonder why :-)

6-series also brought the famous SLI technology support, as well as support for TurboCache for entry-level PC's. But what was also interesting - it also brought one of the most popular video cards ever to the market - 6600 GT (on the picture). We were a big fans of Gainward's 6600GT GS GLH cards, and a lot of people were right there with us, as well....