The good old Ultra, with a 250MHz core clock matched to 230MHz DDR SDRAM (460MHz SDR SDRAM equivalent). The GeForce2 Ultra core is the same as the GeForce2 GTS core, containing four pixel pipelines each capable of rendering one pixel per clock with two textures per pixel. Four pixels per clock at 250MHz gives you a one gigapixel per second fill rate. And at two textures per pixel, we're talking a two gigagtexel per second texel rate. Yeehaw! TSMC's .18 micron GX process is a newer process technology, which apparently enables NVIDIA to push their GeForce2 architecture a bit further than with the GeForce2 GTS. And backing up the blazing fast GPU core is 64MB of 230MHz DDR SDRAM. According to NVIDIA, that is the fastest DDR SDRAM memory available on a consumer product today. With the equivalent of 460MHz memory running on a 128-bit memory bus, the GeForce2 Ultra carries an astounding 7.4 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth. That is faster than a four-channel PC800 RDRAM system (though a 128-bit RDRAM interface would have 12.8GBps of memory bandwidth). With 64MB of very fast memory, the GeForce2 Ultra is tuned for running at 1600x1200 and beyond.

At 250MHz, the GeForce2 Ultra GPU can push a theoretical max of about 31 million polygons per second, compared to the GeForce2 GTS' 25 million polygon per second rate. Considering that so few games today make good use, let alone any use, of the polygon pushing power of the GeForce 256 and it's 15 million polygons per second rate, 31 million polygons per second is just overkill. Not that that's bad!

Otherwise, beyond the major speed improvements over the GeForce2 GTS, the GeForce2 Ultra architecture is essentially the same as a GeForce2 GTS, and Creative' Annihilator 2 Ultra is mostly the same as their Annihilator 2, except that the Ultra is a whole heck of a lot faster.

With such aggressively clocked memory and a 250MHz GPU, the Annihilator 2 Ultra needs serious cooling to run stably. Creative followed NVIDIA's reference design to the T with their own Ultra, using what appears to be an identical fan and heat sink for the GPU as well as the standard "Kermit green" pair of heat sinks, one for each row of four memory devices. The cooling is not quite as impressive as the cooling on the Hercules Ultra, but it gets the job done and leaves lesser cards green with envy.

To the Benchmarks!