nickc said:
_FAKE_, u do realize lots of us hate ATI cards because their drivers are so bad among other things.
Believe it or not their drivers are more stable than nVidia drivers and I know cause I own both ATI and nVidia cards. I'm not siding with ATI but saying their drivers are bad is just wrong. Also their latest drivers offer up to 10-50% performance boost in a few games.
Ever wondered why nVidia is constantly bringing out drivers for their cards? ever wondered why they are always beta and not WHQL certified? its because their drivers suck and they are always having to fix bugs and errors. ATI drivers are a lot better.
As for performance, well nVidia owns that sector easily and will likely own that sector in the next gen cards but ATI will beat them by quite a margin in price and will have a better bang for buck. Take for instance the HD4850, its meant to be faster than 9800GTX (and judging by specs it should be) whilst being sold at around $190-$250 which puts it squarely in the price range of the 8800GT. nVidia won't stand a chance against this without losing money on their side.
Simple fact is ATI have found a way to make high performance cards cheaper. nVidia simply improved on their current cards but at a higher price.
I for one am aiming to buy a GTX280 because I want the best card there is, but the HD4870 will likely be half the price or even cheaper and definitely won't be half as powerful.
I'll be waiting for benchmarks before making a decision however. If the GTX 280 is in my price range and offers a fair decent performance gain over HD4870 I'll get it even though it won't be better bang for buck. But if HD4870 proves to be a very solid performer in most/all games I'll get that instead. The HD4870 will have far lower power consumption at idle (something like 5-10W) which is a huge bonus considering I leave my PC on 24/7. As for load, I wouldn't know, but the GDDR5 memory is supposed to use less power than GDDR3 which nVidia will be using whilst having almost twice as high clock speeds.