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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."
$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.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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.
Full Tilt
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.
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.
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.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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.).
My UID is a prime number. Yeah, I planned that.