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NVIDIA's 8800 Ultra Provides Performance at a Price

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the pixels-and-vectors-and-shading-oh-my dept.

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."

19 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. My Wallet hurts reading this one... by Kid+Zero · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    1. Re:My Wallet hurts reading this one... by Aladrin · · Score: 3, Insightful

      $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
    2. Re:My Wallet hurts reading this one... by suv4x4 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:My Wallet hurts reading this one... by jimstapleton · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --
      34486853790
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    4. Re:My Wallet hurts reading this one... by Fweeky · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "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.

    5. Re:My Wallet hurts reading this one... by Deliveranc3 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

  2. Faster? Yes. Performance for pricepoint? No. by hsa · · Score: 5, Informative

    Read this review.

    http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2979

    And conclusion
    "But not this time: The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra is an utter waste of money. "

    Don't pay $180 extra for something that gives only few percents extra.

  3. Pointless card by eebra82 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  4. Not mine! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    I just bought 4 of these puppies for the pure, unadulterated performance boost that makes my life significantly more comfortable during the daily WoW grinding for my demanding gold farm biz.

  5. Considering existing 8800GTXs are faster by Shivetya · · Score: 4, Interesting

    whats the point?

    XFX and others have factory over clocked cards with better speeds than the ultra, though the ultra does feature better memory that should allow overclocked ultras to be quicker than overclocked gtxs.

    One thing I did find interesting, most sites say that Nvidia is only competing against itself as the R600 is supposedly very disappointing. In other words, its no threat to the 88 series

    --
    * Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
  6. It is a complete RIP OFF!!! by Fallen+Kell · · Score: 4, Informative

    The reviews that were posted here on /. while good normally didn't do their homework today with this new card. Only Anandtech seemed to take a look at what is currently available in terms of factory overclocked 8800GTX's on the market. They used the EVGA 8800GTX KO w/AC3, which benches within less then 1% of the performance of the 8800 Ultra AND costs $180 LESS!

    Read the review yourself....

    --
    We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
    1. Re:It is a complete RIP OFF!!! by MBGMorden · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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
    2. Re:It is a complete RIP OFF!!! by Fallen+Kell · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --
      We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
  7. Quad SLI by Coleon · · Score: 2, Funny

    Great ... now ill sell my four 8800 GTX. and in ... maybe 10 years i could get the money to buy ONE of those. Damn AMDTI why are you keeping away from US!!! I hope the price war will make the ULTRA a little bit cheaper. I just want to play my starcraft with a Quad SLI ULTRA :-)

  8. Why Ultra already? by Murrdox · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  9. Nvidia keeps releasing Hardware without Drivers. by Jackie_Chan_Fan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Nvidia needs to stop releasing new cards. The current 8800 GTX and GTS have absolutely terrible driver support in XP and Vista. There is no reason Nvidia should be releasing hardware. They need to get their asses in gear and write some real drivers.

    XP drivers have serious overlay issues, and gui rendering issues that cause adobe apps to be very unstable. It has vsync problems that can crush opengl performance from 160FPS at 2560x1600 to 15fps !!!

    The Nvidia control panel is complete shit. Its impossible to use, and its a half ass work in progress. The color control sucks in the nvidia panel.

    Anyone editing in Avid Express, or Media Composer will quickly find that Video Overlay's on the 8800gtx are rendered with a different color space than regular ui rendered stuff... It makes it near impossible to match the two also because Nvidia's drivers control panel is horrible.

    Nvidia has decided to not support NFORCE 3 boards on Vista. How fucking convenient for them. There is no reason to not support it. It's not that old and the platform can use pretty fast modern cpus and gpus.

    Nvidia sold the 8800 as vista ready, without even having a vista driver written...

    To this day, the Vista drivers still suck and both the XP or Vista drivers have had very few updates in the course of 4 months. (1 update for xp drivers)

    I just dont see Nvidia taking things seriously this time around. They are really fucking up something great. BTW i question the 8800 hardware, because there has been a lot of hardware bugs with the dam thing. Check out EVGA's forum and all of the RMAs that have taken place and how many problems people have with the 8800

    AVOID the 8800 until Nvidia gets their shit together.

  10. Re:Nvidia keeps releasing Hardware without Drivers by dhakbar · · Score: 2, Informative

    They just released the new Forceware drivers today.

  11. Re:Nvidia keeps releasing Hardware without Drivers by ASBands · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  12. Re:Nvidia keeps releasing Hardware without Drivers by Jackie_Chan_Fan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It is most certainly not a "fanboi" rant anymore than you're a troll.

    Go read the nvidia forum, even TODAY, look at the complaints and all of the problems with the drivers released today.

    I cant for the life of me imagine why you would think it is a fan boy rant? I own an nv 8800gtx, installed in my quad core qx6700 workstation which i use for 3d animation and modelling professionally. This is not a fan boy rant. I didnt just make up the opengl vsync issue... I fucking discovered it! After scratching my head and trying to figure out why in the hell opengl was so deathly slow, I ran the same opengl test on an ATI x1550 AGP that was in my web surfing computer.... The ATI smoked the 8800 in opengl performance (this is softimage XSI, not doom 3 :) )

    The 8800 was choking at 15FPS will all 4 viewports being displayed, where as the ATI was 90 to 100fps... and this is all rendering at 2560x1600 on my hp 30inch monitor...

    The 8800GTX has been NOTHING but hell since i got it. The few games i played... Company of Hereos for one, would render stray polygons and stretch them into infinity...

    You can not run the 8800gtx with the /3G switch, or else you can expect ALL adobe applications to basically not redraw. They simply will work for 4 minutes and then a massive redraw melt down will take place...

    Turn off the /3 Switch... and the redraw problem goes away... although it seems to be back with Adobe CS3, so i'm guessing Nvidia needs to fix something in their drivers again...

    As for quadro cards... I've owned them. They were NEVER worth their price. Most people run Geforces, not Quadros in their workstations. Quadros are nice by insanely over priced and often lacking in performance compared to the geforces...

    And WHY would i buy another quadro, when Nvidia cant even support NFORCE3 anymore, OR write a dam driver for the 8800gtx? You're saying i should invest even more money into Nvidia after having been SCREWED by them?

    Hmm.. RANT yes.. Fan boy? no. I have never liked ATI. The 9800pro i owned, i was given (game developement) The ATI x1550 AGP is in my web surfing pc... The PC i basically do nothying excepot get email and do office stuff on...

    Nvidia's XP drivers are stable in that XP wont crash... but they are have serious issues as i've listed.

    Plenty of people edit video with a Geforce card. Nv8800GTX isnt just a consumer card. A $600 video card is not a consumer card in my eyes. Most people wont buy the dam thing. These are enthusiast cards.... Its a high performance card, the fastest yet... Are you saying it is ok to have terrible drivers for a $600 peice of hardware? Are you saying it is ok to release hardware as "vista ready" without a dam driver that functions in vista?!??

    And As for the video editing overlay... I'll leave you with this. Do a search on Avid's forum. Yes AVID does recommend the Quadro line of cards for Media Composer... But if you search the forum... you'll quickly find out that the QUADRO cards have the same dam video overlay color problem. It was fixed in one of the drivers, and broken again in the next... and AVID had to tell its customers to adjust the color overlay settings in Nvidia's control panel. The problem is... It is NEAR impossible to match the overlay color, with the regular gdi color values. So when you're stopping and pausing your video in avid... the dam video colors change, which makes it quite hard to color correct etc.

    Buying an expensive quadro would not solve that issue. It's all Nvidia's driver...

    I just want Nvidia to support their product, which in my opinion is the best dam card out there... but it is so plagued with problems.

    A friend of mine pointed out to Nvidia actually a vsync issue within their hardware, and they all run quadros... to do large format 3d at very high resolutions real time.... Nvidia's response was "ooops oh yeah thats a bug" Basically they couldnt get the cards to all sync and render the frames together across multiple displays...

    They're going to ATI now.

    I could careless WHO gets my money, as long as the dam thing works.