When they released that amazing Geforce 8800 GTX, GTS and a a little later GTS320 line of videocards they stated there was no Ultra Version in their plans, they said that was a way of respecting their customers (and giving their partners a free way to flood the market with overclocked versions of the reference gpus)
Nvidia regained their top position based on great products like the Geforce 6600 that sported DDR3 a long time ago, their fast 7XXX line and their 8XXX series that were the first to include DirectX10 support more than a year ago. Maybe now is the time when all those engineers working together since AMD bought Ati are going to show us what they´ve been up to all this time.
In the Nvidia side of the field there is nothing to write home about, the new card specs are underwhelming.
this is little more than a steeply overlcocked 8800 GTX. It has the same number of stream processors as the 8800 GTX (128), the same-sized memory buffer (768MB), and the same-sized memory interface (384-bit)I really like my 8800GTS but I would love to have that onboard acceleration PureVideo HD engine present on the cheaper parts like 8600 and this new card does not have it either, a huge letdown and boy the price tag is steep, 830 bucks
The core on a reference-design card will run at 612MHz (compared to 575MHz on the 8800 GTX), the shaders will be clocked at 1.5GHz (compared 1.35GHz), and the memory will be set at 1.08GHz (compared to 900MHz)..
I cant imagine PC gamers making lines to buy this thing, although there is always the spolide brat that needs more and more to be able to brag about it.