Uh.. could you clearify that a little bit.. I don't know if it's because I was up late at a party last night... or if Iam tired or what but Iam not sure Iam getting what your saying lol
Iam not sure on the vid cards, you said GTX- but you linked a Ultra... so that didn't help much.. and the 8800 from fatality is pretty impressive- even comparing it directly to the ultra- its up to par with it on most things. In fact.. choosing between the two:
The ultra- for 300 dollars more only seems to give these advantages
128 v 96 stream proccessors
1510 v 1500 (Mhz) shader clock
103.68 v 80 (Gb/sec) bandwidth
384 v 320 (bit) memory bus
2160 v 2000 (mhz) memory clock
768 v 320 (mb) video RAM
612 v 650 (mhz) core clock (no I didn't switch them- the fatal1ty has higher)
SO to me- its a waste of money for the ultra. 300 dollars more for minimal improvement- expecially when I've been on a 128 mb Radeon for like 7 years and it still plays Doom 3, UT2k4 and FEAR flawlessly. So the 768vid I find useless- if 128/256 can handle it, 320 definately will. You gain very little in buying the ultra over it- the clock speeds are slightly faster (except in the case with core clock) and anything with 320 bit memory bus is going to scream for games- heck even 128 bits work well.
Final conclusion for me- 4 hours of reseach and thinking- 8800 ultra OUT. Not enough performance for its price.
XFX GeForce 8800 GTS - Fatal1ty edition - beautiful card, and not just its colours.
Even if 8800GTS had higher clock speed, the 8800Ultra will still give you more Texture and pixel fill rate.
612MHz with 32 TMU will give you more Texture fill rate than 650MHz with 24 TMU
612MHz with 24 ROP with give you more pixel fill rate than 650MHz with 20 ROP
A stock 8800Ultra is better than Fatal1ty edition in every way.
However, MSI 8800Ultra has 660MHz clock speed and 2300MHz memory speed, and it is under $600 in newegg, it has higher clock and it cheaper than other Ultra
Newegg.com - MSI NX8800Ultra-T2D768E-HD-OC GeForce 8800Ultra 768MB 384-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card - Retail
You said that your 7 years old Radeon runs FEAR flawlessly ??!! Are you trying to fool us ? FEAR need a video card with pixel shader support. 7 years ago there were no video card with pixel shader support.