Although we were impressed by the 8800 GTX when it launched in 2006, nobody, including Nvidia, anticipated how long-lived this GPU would be. After all, the 8800 GTX was the first unified-shader, DirectX 10 GPU, and first-generation products usually aren't very effective.
The 8800 GTX is a hefty piece of engineering. It was the first graphics card with two 6-pin PCI-E power sockets, and at 266mm long, it's one of the largest cards on the market. Six months later, the 8800 GTX was joined by the 8800 Ultra, which is architecturally identical, but has an improved cooler and is therefore capable of running at a higher frequency. The GPU core of the 8800 GTX runs at 575MHz while the 8800 Ultra runs at 612MHz. Both GPUs have 128 stream processors; in the 8800 GTX, these are clocked at 1.35GHz, and in the 8800 Ultra at 1.5GHz. Both cards are fitted with 768MB of GDDR3 - an amount that was unheard of at the time - which communicates with the GPU through a 384-bit memory controller. The RAM on the 8800 GTX is clocked at 900MHz (1.8GHz effective), and 1.08GHz (2.16GHz effective) on the 8800 Ultra.
Despite their age, these iconic cards were up to the challenge of playing most of our games smoothly at medium or high resolutions. X3: Terran Conflict and Fallout 3 were both playable at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4x AA and 8x AF. Far Cry 2 was playable at 1,680 x 1,050 with 2x AA, while at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4x AA, they were only a couple of frames shy of being playable. Neither card could render Crysis Warhead smoothly, but a little overclocking would make the game playable. Both cards are monster folders, but due to their old-school 90nm manufacturing process, they consume a lot of power.
Although you can no longer buy either card, both are still fast enough to play some DirectX 10 games without sacrificing quality settings. As such, this article will be the third since the original reviews of the 8800 GTX and 8800 Ultra in which we recommend holding on a little longer before upgrading.
Nvidia ought to be ashamed that more than two years later, it still has to provide a convincing replacement for these great cards. The 8800 GTX and 8800 Ultra - we salute you.
Author: James Gorbold & Mark Mackay
Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra