Nvidia's latest 3D card sets records, breaks banks.

We know that some of you won't balk at the $829 price tag of Nvidia's new highest-end GeForce 8800 Ultra 3D card, as long as it's the fastest thing around. With ATI's next-gen Radeon cards right around the corner, though, we'd definitely wait and take a few more laps around the money bin before springing for any high-end 3D cards today. The 8800 Ultra doesn't hit the street until May 15th, so you have a few days to think it over. But even if the Ultra card beats its soon-to-be-released competition, we have to ask if it's worth paying $125 or so more for only a 10% to 15% performance gain (according to Nvidia itself) over Nvidia's former king card, the GeForce 8800 GTX.

Nvidia's latest high-end 3D card, the Geforce 8800 Ultra

(Credit: Nvidia)

Basically an overclocked 8800 GTX, the 8800 Ultra gets its performance gains from faster core, memory, and shader clock speeds. Whereas the GTX has a 575MHz core, a 1.8GHz memory clock, and 1,350MHz for the shaders, the 8800 Ultra has 612MHz for the core, 2.16GHz memory, and a 1.5MHz shader clock. Both cards have 768MB of DDR3 SDRAM, currently the most memory we've seen on any consumer 3D card.

Nvidia didn't send a standalone 8800 Ultra for us to test, so we'll send you to the fine folks at Anandtech and PC Perspective for the full run-down of benchmark results. Their opinions from their testing mirror our own nonscientific conclusions based on the card's on-paper specs. The GeForce 8800 Ultra is indeed faster than the 8800 GTX (the former single fastest GPU), but even if you possess the financial wherewithal to shop for a near-$1,000 gaming card, we don't think it's worth the high price for what seems to be a nominal boost to 3D performance.