The Effect of CPU Speed
It's difficult to exactly compare the 950MHz Thunderbird results to the 550MHz P3 ones, because the Thunderbird/KT133 machine has much higher memory throughput than the P3/Apollo Pro 133A system - this is exacerbated by the P3 system only using PC100 RAM, so a linear MHz-to-MHz comparison is not possible. However, given that the Thunderbird system with the Ultra at default clock is 33% faster than the P3 system at 1024x768x32 in 3DMark2000, and if the same comparison is made at 1600x1200x32 the difference has only dropped to 24%, it seems to me that the Ultra has still got a way to go before being maxed out by the processor.

This Thunderbird 950 system is by no means a slouch but just to see if the Ultra would benefit further from an even faster CPU, I hooked up the watercooler and cranked the TBird to 11.5x100 (reported as 1160MHz) and ran it through the default (1024x768x16) 3DMark2000 benchmark. The card was overclocked to 285/500 this time and achieved a blistering 9123 3DMarks. This is 11% faster than the comparable 950MHz score, from a 21% rise in CPU speed. I think this is still fairly linear given that there are inherent inefficiencies in the overall system and, while not being totally scientific it does show that this card is not going to be a bottleneck in pretty much ANY firebreathing system today or for the next little while.

Conclusions
I guess at this point, there are two questions you should be asking yourself. The first is "Do I want a GeForce2 Ultra card?" and the second is "Do I want this GeForce2 Ultra card from Creative Labs?". The answer to the first one is a totally personal decision. Even picking the cheapest Ultra card off the shelf is going to leave a serious dent in your wallet. Also don't forget NV20, NVIDIA's next chipset offering which could well be available in about 3 months. You have to decide if you need an upgrade from your current card right now, and if you want to jump to the front of the performance queue at this point. If you do, and speed is your object right now and money is a secondary concern, then get an Ultra and enjoy owning the fastest video card on the planet. This brings up the second question. I have to say from my past experience with Creative GeForce cards I would have no qualms about recommending them from a quality, compatability or reliability perspective, and their strategy of trimming back the features and frills in order to ship a comparatively low-cost but high-performance product is one that I totally agree with. So if you're in the market, definitely consider the Creative Labs 3DBlaster GeForce2 Ultra 64MB.

In fact, the only further thing I have to say is you'd better hurry - you've only got a few days left to buy me one for Christmas!