smoggy12345 :
How on earth have you come up with that conclusion!?
The G80 was praised because it blew the competiton out the water and remained strong even till the last generation (8800Ultra vs 4850/4870)
For a start no-one has even seen the competiton yet from Nvidia and it isnt a revelation in anything at all, yeh it doubled the 4870 but its still only 20-30% faster than a GTX285!
The only, and i mean ONLY, is eyefinity...which will probs require quadfire to work well in most graphic heavy games...not to forget hundreds of dollars worth of monitors! So only good for general browsing the net and for working for most people.
And of course DX11.....but Nvidia have DX11 cards coming out also!
Nothing exciting about the hd5870, sorry!
To say that just because the G80 was rehashed over and over in new cards says less about its "great" architecture and more about NVidia's R&D department. Further, more about ATi's R&D department until the 4800 series. Some say don't fix what isn't broke, but if NVidia had stopped saying "Just rehash, rename, and resell" maybe they wouldn't have these problems with their chip development right now.
Just to clarify so there's not any arguing about things I don't disagree with: The 8800GTX/Ultra were good cards, they lasted, but NVidia just built off of them for far too long because ATi wasn't bringing competition to the table like they should have which artificially rose prices and created a very large base of NVidia-prone customers. The HD 5870 is comparable because NVidia should've had the competition already (though they opted to not release competition, rather than release lesser performing competition which is better for PR), and say what you want, but we don't have any information on their new offerings yet which means saying the performance is comparable is all hype at this point.
Additionally, for a card to have the same performance as last generations dual-GPU performance king (GTX 295) at a lower price, with less heat, and considerably less power is nothing to scoff at when the competition hasn't even made a card in a lab to put up some numbers with. Lets also not forget they've already completed their budget line as well, bringing it downline to mainstream customers which is incredibly important. The performance king always sells cards on the low end, don't forget that. People were buying the 8600 and 8800 GTs because of the 8000's name, not to say they didn't have the performance to back it up. It's excellent engineering at the very least, which can be said of the 8800GTX/Ultra before they were being used for two years straight.