No more 7800 Ultra

[Steve]

Word has it that NVIDIA won't be releasing a GeForce 7800 Ultra any more. The reason seems to be that they think it would impact upon 7800 GTX sales, and they think they can manage against R520 without it.

Read more in HEXUS.tech-news.

[crepness]

From the news on the R520, it seems that ATI are gonna be lagging behind Nvidia this generation unless ATI have got something amazing up their sleeves.

[DR]

I love speculation

Maybe NVIDIA are holding back due to 520? Maybe they are trying to clear stock on 78GTX? Who knows....

[neonplanet40]

I still think the R520 is going to be brill. And i think (or hope should i say) that it will be neck and neck with the ultra. Truth being known we know very little facts about the R520 to say how good or bad it will be. Only speculation and rumours.

Neo

[DR]

ATI would not release a part in todays market which would not compete - the only question I have is with volume shipments.

NVIDIA did very well to get G70 avaliable in quantity for launch

[neonplanet40]

I agree. They gave a date and instead of the usual paper launch and 6 month wait for quantity they done all at once. Which was very impressive. And if ATI is having yeild problems with these new cards then i can see them being in for a very hard time.....

Neo

[jonny4288]

As it stands at the moment there is no need for a 7800 ultra, the full power of the cards wouldnt be used (with the exception of benchmarkers) well at least thats what i think

[Grey M@a]

Wasn't it said to be slower than the 7800GTX? hence why ATi have the 580 in the pipelines already? so the 520 would be the cheaper card of the 580 I think thats the case.

[kalniel]

Won't any more, or won't for now?

I'm sure they've not just sat on their green backsides, but are busy working on the next series refresh. There probably comes a point where it makes no sense to fab a new sku when the series refresh is only x months away.

[oralpain]

I heard form the very beginning (months ago) that the 7800GTX was always intended to be the top of the line NVIDIA card of this generation/product cycle.

Never though there ever was or would ever be a 7800"Ultra".

[sawyen]

but then it would be cool to have an uber product like 7800 Ultra on the record sheet... All 24pipes stretching its muscles at 600MHz core / 1500MHz mem (stop dreaming).. Maybe they'll reconsider when AMD releases 5000+ or FX-61 @ 3.2Ghz..

[outlawzsm]

Meh, no need for another one. It would hurt their GTX sales. Besides it wouldn't be able to use it to its full potential because of this CPU bottleneck issue.

[noTHINGface]

Besides it wouldn't be able to use it to its full potential because of this CPU bottleneck issue.

Heh, a bet you my eyelids that if they released one [Ultra] some people would still buy one....

[Oakey]

Heh, a bet you my eyelids that if they released one [Ultra] some people would still buy one....

No, they'd buy two, along with the most expensive CPU available to replace the previously most expensive CPU available currently in their system, plus they'd buy the most expensive RAM possible just to keep the equilibrium

[car7er]

have ATI released a estimated release date/price range yet for their R520 card?

[Speed]

"NVIDIA DECIDED to cancel its upcoming G70 Ultra card, a real shocker. We checked this news really well as it sounded crazy to us at first place. However, there is good business sense behind that hard decision.
Nvidia knows that ATI can no ship many R520 XT's running at 600/1400MHz and therefore won't get into relaunching a new faster clocked G70 chip. The G70 Ultra was supposed to be a faster version of G70 card based on existing 110 chip, just clocked faster.

Nvidia G70 ultra would likely be very competitive to R520 XT but it would hurt G70, Geforce 7800 GTX sales and therefore Nvidia won't release it. So all of you who have been waiting for 7800 Ultra you can just forget about it.

Business wise it's better to ship many GTX and GTs and sell them in quantities than to release a limited but faster Ultra. We learned that Nvidia shipped a few tens of thousands of GTX and GTs already and it has been shipping in numbers ever since. Last thing you want is to upset people with releasing Ultra, a card that would be marginally faster than G70 and likely to create more problems than solve them.

In that light a very limited but available R520XT might be a Yule winner and best performer and Geforce 7800 GTX is here to stay. At some point Nvidia has to update it to a 512MB memory version but that’s about it. The key problem for ATI is that it cannot ship a few tens of thousands of those units until December, no chance at all, and Nvidia can reach and beat those volumes with its highly available GTX part.

Nvidia will have some product refresh of its existing architecture but it's just not the right time for it I guess, it will take longer."

Source: the Inquirer


I guess it does make sense for them to cancel it and just update the GTX with 512Mb of Ram in the future. However this could be good news for Ati, maybe giving them the room to recover a little. Or maybe Nvidia are just stalling to see what Ati bring out and finish them off with the Ultra. Who knows!