Final thoughts
Let's lay it out and not mince words. XFX's GeForce 6800 Ultra 512MB graphics card, priced at around £470 or so, doesn't represent decent value to the gamer right now. Performance in a wide range of modern games is rarely, if ever, better than a 256MB Ultra's. The asking price is above both a single GeForce 7800 GTX's and a pair of SLI'd GeForce 6800 GTs'. Both cards will comfortably outperform the single 512MB GeForce 6800 Ultra when shading and, to some extent, fillrate become the bottleneck. It's difficult to recommend XFX's card when viewed from a pure gaming standpoint, then.However, if you think about it for a second or two, the 512MB GeForce 6800 Ultra's specification is pretty similar to NVIDIA's workstation-class QuadroFX 4400 512MB card. Both use a 512MB framebuffer, obviously, and the QuadroFX 4400 carries two dual-link DVI ports as opposed to the XFX's one. £470 may sound expensive for a single card but consider that a QuadroFX 4400 costs well over £1000. We'd imagine that XFX's 512MB GeForce 6800 Ultra card will do well in professional OpenGL applications. From what we can gather, the additional framebuffer over and above a 256MB model pays huge performance dividends. Assuming that your pocket is deep enough, XFX's 512MB Ultra will happily drive luscious extra-high resolution displays.
You need to evaluate what you require in a graphics card. On the one hand, XFX's GeForce 6800 Ultra 512MB makes a compelling case as a cheap, relatively-speaking, workstation-class card, capable of running exotic displays. On the other though, and this affects the majority of potential buyers who tend to be gamers, you'd be better off opting for a single GeForce 7800 GTX or a couple of GeForce 6800 GTs in SLI formation. £470, then, will be either a snip or prohibitively expensive, depending upon your intended need.
