Test Setup and Methods
As can probably be discerned from the title of this article, this is not going to be a full review of the 8800Ultra. We did not receive a review sample to get the full hands-on experience that we are accustomed to, and our amount of time with the card was severely limited by both geographic and political factors. For that reason, we have really only run conclusive tests in three applications: Futuremark’s 3DMark06, Valve’s Half-Life 2: Episode 1, and Monolith’s F.E.A.R. Nevertheless, we feel that these applications provide a surprisingly good cross-section of the performance that is offered by this new card. Again, it was out of the goodness of a friend’s heart that we were able to get our hands on these cards, and our time with the cards was limited to say the least.

One thing we did get to do, however, was put two of these crazy new cards in SLI mode – something you probably won’t be seeing anywhere else. If the 8800Ultra is truly a more powerful version of the 8800GTX, then by all accounts, two 8800Ultra’s in SLI configuration constitute the most powerful graphics subsystem in existence – at least for now. Here is a look at the platform we used for testing these cards:

Hardware Configuration

• Power Supply: Tagan TU96 1100W
• Motherboard: ASUS P5N32-E SLI nForce 680i
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800 (Varying MHz, 2933MHz Stock)
• Hard Drive: Western Digital 800JD 7200RPM, 80GB with 8MB Cache Buffer
• Video: XFX NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX eXtreme 600MHz core clock 2x NVIDIA GeForce 8800Ultra (612/1080)
• Memory: 2048MB (2x1024MB) Corsair XMS2 PC2 8500 (1066MHz @ 5-5-5-15 2T)
• Cooling: Vigor Monsoon II
• Monitor: Acer X241WSD (24", 1920x1200, 6ms)

Software Configuration

• Motherboard BIOS: 1002
• Operating System: Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2
• Video Driver: NVIDIA ForceWare Version 158.19

So then, the four configurations we used during testing are:

• 8800GTX: Above setup with a single XFX NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX eXtreme, all else stock
• 8800Ultra: Above setup with a single reference NVIDIA GeForce 8800Ultra, all else stock
• 8800Ultra SLI: Above setup with 2x reference NVIDIA GeForce 8800Ultra's in SLI configuration, all else stock
• 8800Ultra SLI OC: Above setup with 2x reference NVIDIA GeForce 8800Ultra's in SLI configuration, processor overclocked to 3736MHz (14x266).

Our testing consisted of our normal methods; testing each game at each resolution three times. The provided score is the average of those three tests. In several cases, we have actually tested the resolutions more than three times because we thought the numbers were weird for one reason or another. Those scores are reported as the average of all tests, and if anything are marginally more accurate than the other results.

After running tests with a single 8800Ultra, we added another to get scores for SLI. After that, we thought it would be a prime opportunity to explore CPU limitation with the current popular benchmarking applications. When you have a graphics subsystem as capable as two 8800Ultra’s, you can truly begin to see the effects of CPU limitation on games that have been deemed as mostly GPU limited in the past.

It is very very very important to note that the driver used in all tests on the 8800Ultra cards was simply a modified version of the currently available ForceWare version 158.19. NVIDIA will have a special production driver available for the 8800Ultra on May 2nd (today!), and will be following that release with a second in the next week.