GeForce 2 Ultra announced

NVIDIA's GeForce 2 might already be the world's fastest 3D graphics card, but with 3dfx's monstrous four processor Voodoo 5 6000 and ATI's Radeon 256 on the horizon, the company isn't happy to rest on its laurels. They have just announced the latest addition to their GPU family, imaginatively naming the bundle of joy the "GeForce 2 Ultra". The GeForce 2 chip has been sped up from 200 to 250MHz, while the old 333MHz memory has been replaced by 64Mb of the new 460MHz variety, increasing memory bandwidth from 5.3 to 7.4GB/s. Ouch.

In related news, NVIDIA have released the latest version of their Detonator drivers, promising a performance increase of up to 50% for DirectX 7 and OpenGL games. A quick test with Quake III Arena (1600x1200, 32 bit colour, everything set to max) saw an increase from 31.5 to 39.5 frames per second on my GeForce 2 powered Pentium III 600 - an impressive 25% improvement. If you have a Riva TNT, TNT 2 or TNT 2 Ultra, or a GeForce, GeForce 2 or GeForce 2 MX based graphics card, you can download the new drivers here.