Introduction

NV20?

Since NVIDIA announced the GeForce 2 GTS in late April, it would usually be safe to assume that we wouldn't hear anything out of NVIDIA for another six months. Well, it's only August, but NVIDIA has just announced its newest card, the GeForce 2 Ultra.

First, we should make it clear that the Ultra is not NVIDIA's highly anticipated NV20 chip. The Ultra is the NV16. Wasn't the NV20 supposed to be NVIDIA's fall product? Yes, but plans have changed.

What's that?

There's something out there!

The NV20 chip was designed with DirectX 8 in mind, but games that take advantage of DX8 won't be available until well after the fall product cycle. Couple that with the fact that the 0.15 manufacturing process the NV20 chip requires won't be ready until late this year, and you have a product delay. Instead of going with a difficult Christmastime release, NVIDIA has chosen to delay the NV20 for the beginning of next year.

A tasty morsel

NVIDIA isn't entering the fall cycle empty-handed -the company is releasing the GeForce 2 Ultra to tide us over until the end of the year. Many of you probably remember the "Ultra" moniker from back in the TNT2 days. The TNT2 Ultra was simply a TNT2 card with faster core and memory settings; the same is true with the GeForce 2 Ultra.

The GeForce 2 Ultra is simply a GF2 with a higher core clock and faster memory. We managed to obtain a preview board last week. Read on to find out how much faster this board actually is and how it performed in our tests!

Looks like a crawfish.

That ain't no crawfish!