Nvidia plays power game

Just three weeks after ATI released Radeon, the fastest graphics card on the market, Nvidia has unveiled an even more powerful product - the GeForce 2 Ultra.

Just three weeks after ATI released Radeon, the fastest graphics card on the market, Nvidia has unveiled an even more powerful product - the GeForce 2 Ultra.

Nvidia claimed that combining the card with the firm's latest drivers offers more than double the performance of the GeForce2 GTS when running high-performance applications in 32bit colour.

However, the company said that the cards will offer performance about 25 per cent better than the GTS. Noticeably, the Ultra is the first card to support DDR-SDRam, which increases its memory bandwidth by 42 per cent to 7.4Gbps, compared with the GeForce2's 5.2Gbps.

It is also a further indication that the computer industry is moving away from the more expensive Rambus modules that have been dogged by manufacturing problems.

Like the GTS, the Ultra will support 64Mb of frame buffer memory and AGP 4x in fast write mode, and will provide Nvidia's second-generation transform and lighting engine.

Boards containing the Ultra are expected to ship in about a month's time.