ASUS V9999 Ultra Deluxe - GeForce 6800 Ultra

The "Deluxe" bundle that ASUS shipped to us for this evalation includes a USB Webcam and overclocking software.  Below we'll cover the software side of this offering briefly for you.

ASUS SmartDoctor & GameFace Live ASUS Utilities & Software

ASUS SmartDoctor is your basic core and memory clock analysis tool that also gives you the ability to adjust timings on the fly from within Windows.  Because we were using standard NVIDIA drivers for testing, this basic functionality is already provided. Regardless, ASUS SmartDoctor does what it is intended to do.

GameFace Live is an application that ASUS provides to go along with the USB Web cam that the company bundles in.  This product allows gamers to have Web video conference capabilities during game play with a direct connection with up to eight other players simultaneously.  This application, which runs on top of the game environment in the background, can really add to the fun factor and potentially provide a considerable advantage in strategy games such as Counter Strike.  Our Tech Writer, Jeff Bouton, went into good detail on both GameFace Live and the bundled ASUS Video Security software that comes with ASUS Deluxe model GeForce 6800 cards.  Head over there for more details on both of these bundled applications.  All told, ASUS is obviously trying to add value to this high-priced GeForce 6800 Ultra offering.  These additional features and functionality go beyond being simple novelties and provide considerable additional functionality, maximizing the available features of the product. 

Screen Shots: Star Wars Battlefront Halo Game Engine Based Jedi Mind Tricks

As with many of our graphics card articles, we decided we would provide some in-game screen shot footage here for your viewing pleasure.  We've covered image quality between ATi and NVIDIA cards, along with their latest drivers, in good detail recently, so there's no need to rehash that in this showcase.  Both product offerings are very similar in terms of their respective rendering output and overall image quality.  However, it's always fun to see what these new high-end GPUs can do with a leading-edge game engine, so let's have a look.

Recently released, Star Wars Battlefront is a first-person-shooter style game that employs next-generation DX9 lighting and pixel shader effects.  The game engine looks to be a modified Halo port, and as you can see, the visuals are impressive.  We haven't found an elegant way of benchmarking the game as of yet, short of a FRAPS recording during game play. However, the ASUS V9999 Ultra Deluxe ran this title at 1,600 X 1,200 with full 4X AA and 8X Aniso Filtering without so much as a hiccup.  Even at these high resolutions and IQ settings, the game was completely fluid and responsive even in demanding large-scale firefight senarios.