NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra

Final Words

It's amazing how things can completely turn around for a company with a single product release. To those of you that have any doubt in your mind, as sad as it is to say, NVIDIA's NV20 will not be here until Spring 2001. Instead, we are to live with the $500 GeForce2 Ultra and NVIDIA is going to hope that neither 3dfx nor ATI and not even Matrox are able to execute properly this fall, otherwise NVIDIA will most definitely be dethroned as the 3D graphics performance king.

This is the opportunity for the competitors that haven't been able to compete thus far to step forward and push for the release of their products as soon as possible. The GeForce2 Ultra will be out in 30 - 45 days, and the competition already knows what to expect from NVIDIA for the next 6 months, if they can beat that, then they'll have the upper hand, for now at least.

NVIDIA's biggest fear should be ATI at this point. ATI's Radeon is already dangerously close in performance to the GeForce2 GTS. And provided that ATI can produce a Radeon MAXX in time, it will definitely give the GeForce2 Ultra a run for its money and speaking of which, it most definitely won't debut at $500.

ATI's Radeon is currently available and is priced very competitively with the GeForce2 GTS (32MB). Our biggest fear has been driver support and quality, and in order to give a more accurate recommendation we are going to be stress testing the ATI Radeon drivers and will report on their successes and/or failures in an upcoming article a week from now.

At a $500 price point the GeForce2 Ultra most likely won't see the same popularity that even the $300 GeForce2 GTS and the $400 64MB GeForce2 GTS cards saw since their release. The price of the Ultra is heavily dependent on the availability of its ultra-fast 4ns DDR SDRAM, and there is no sign of that cost dropping anytime soon. It will be interesting to see how much Ultra cards drop in price over the next couple of months if any at all.

Performance-wise, you can't argue that the GeForce2 Ultra is the fastest thing to hit the streets thus far. We're not arguing with the performance of the card at all, but for most users, we can't recommend spending $500 on a card that will most likely be outperformed by a sub $300 card in a couple of months. If you want the fastest thing now and don't care about the cost, there's no question that the Ultra is for you.

While the delay of the NV20 isn't great enough to completely throw NVIDIA off course, they need to make sure that when NV20 does come along that it is powerful enough and attractive enough to shadow the competition once again. If not, then NVIDIA might be facing much bigger problems. For now, this is 3dfx's, ATI's and Matrox's chance to step forward and restore some competition to this industry.

To the big three out there, this is your chance, don't screw it up.