Nvidia's GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics card - The Tech Report

Pixel-filling power
We've talked a little bit about shader power and memory bandwidth, but let's pause here to look at pixel and texel throughput alongside memory bandwidth. Shader power is becoming more and more prevalent in newer games, but these old-school metrics still dictate part of the performance picture. As expected, the Ultra's at the top of the heap in nearly every measure.

	Core clock (MHz)	Pixels/ clock	Peak fill rate (Mpixels/s)	Textures/ clock	Peak fill rate (Mtexels/s)	Effective memory clock (MHz)	Memory bus width (bits)	Peak memory bandwidth (GB/s)
GeForce 7950 GT	550	16	8800	24	13200	1400	256	44.8
Radeon X1900 XT	625	16	10000	16	10000	1450	256	46.4
GeForce 7900 GTX	650	16	10400	24	15600	1600	256	51.2
Radeon X1950 XTX	650	16	10400	16	10400	2000	256	64.0
GeForce 8800 GTS	500	20	10000	24	12000	1600	320	64.0
GeForce 8800 GTX	575	24	13800	32	18400	1800	384	86.4
GeForce 8800 Ultra	612	24	14688	32	19584	2160	384	103.7

Yep, the 8800 Ultra has about twice the memory bandwidth of the GeForce 7900 GTX, believe it or not, and it leads in the other categories, including pixel fill rate, texturing capacity, and "impresses the chicks." The only way any existing solution could keep up would be in a multi-GPU configuration. We can measure several of these capabilities via synthetic benchmarks, to see if the Ultra lives up to its potential.