GeForce 8800 Ultra ahoy?

Sunday 04th March 2007, 01:01:00 PM, written by Geo

The folks at VR-Zone have noticed that new ForceWare drivers are now sporting a reference to an "NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra". This would appear to be the green team preparing to fight the appearance of AMD's upcoming R600 GPU. The more interesting question is what will its specifications be? Will it be a cherry-picked 90nm G80, with specs possibly a bit above some of the overclocked 8800s appearing in recent days from NVIDIA AIBs? Or will it be an 80nm optical shrink, and thus possibly a bit more aggressive?

Also, on the memory side, might GDDR4 finally make an appearance on NVIDIA SKUs in a bid to cut down on the expected bandwidth deficit vs the 512-bit bus R600? As for timing, it seems unlikely but not impossible that March would be the target, as reports around the web have reported that NVIDIA will not even be present in strength at CeBIT, an obvious venue for such a launch. April or May would be more likely, and also fit with a bid to keep the performance crown out of R600's hands.

nvidia ±

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