with the way the economy is going worldwide, this is a good idea to generate (i.e. separate us from our hard earned cash)money besides offering competition. Hopefully the cards will go down even more.

If AMD wants to provide more value to its customers, they should do that! The 4870 is one hell of a card, and people who actually bother buying the GTX260 for more money are wasting it. The best option would be to pick up a 4870 now and then crossfire it as soon as money is available. Crossfire scales way better than SLI anyway. Go AMD! Nvidia, step up ure game and stop re-branding old inventory to make money.

I'm also quite shocked at how useless Nvidia Physx is, just seeing the amount (or lack thereof), of effects in Mirror's edge with Physx enabled, leads me to believe that having one platform for graphics and physics processing (while excellent) doesnt make sense with today's hardware. Games are becoming more graphically intensive, the GPU doesnt need anymore tasks to handle than it already has. A couple of graphics cloth pieces here, a few flags there and thats it?? I bet havock physics could do that without causing performance problems, like Physx does.

Despite the written differences posted above in the clock speeds, processors, etc. the 4870 really does seem more of a match to the 260. While the 4870's core clock seems to perform better, in real world texture and pixel output, the GTX 260 (55nm) is significantly better. As long as you're not burdening the nVidia card with PhysX at the same time, I would say that it would be better than the 4870.

That being said, seeing that the 4850 competed with the venerable 8800 GTX, what's the problem with ATI's lineup matching so?

This is precisely why we need AMD to pull through in their battle with Intel. (No fanboyism implied)

So ATI's partners are into price fixing?

Where'd you come up with that? In the majority of benchmarks, 2xGTX260s in SLI top 2 4870's (1GB) in CF as seen here. It varies game to game, resolution, options, etc., and 4870 in CF does top the GTX260 SLI in a few, but certainly does not outright win, nor can you deem it to 'scale better'. You can prefer which ever company you choose, but keep opinions out of objective statements, or back them up with hard data.

As far as PhysX, it's a tossup, it has the ability to do some pretty impressive things, and so does Havok. My personal opinion is that a Physics standard API should be agreed upon and incorporated into DirectX (which has been rumored before). This will level the playing field there, and ensure widespread adoption by developers.

In regard to CUDA vs. Stream, I don't know of many Stream apps. Video encoding benefits from Badaboom were the biggest draw to CUDA for me. Until Stream has competition there, it's just not as useful.

I can understand why they are hesitant to price cuts and the very thought of losing any amount of profits if frightening in these times. However a price cut to the 4870 could increase the sales and make up for the loss of profits. Also if this could take some sales away from Nvidia then even better for them. I'm sure I'm not alone when it comes to buying what gives me the best bang for the buck.

I HATE having to use up all my ammo just to take down the laundry.

Sounds like it to me. I know MSRP is a tool used by manufacturers to keep resale prices up, but rarely does a distributer charge even more (exceptions being convenience stores, airports, etc... where you have no other options).

Pricing the 4850 and 4870 within $20 seems like a mistake to me. The 4850 price is fine, but the 4870 should be closer to $169. Regardless, I loathe MIRs so I don't consider this a real price drop anyways. I'm still waiting for my MIR cheque from my 4850 purchase last November.

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 64-19.html

The difference doesn't appear significant (hard to say since I'm at work and not going to do a math crack down - and I'm too lazy too), but it's not far off my mark. My point is that the 4870 is perfectly in line with competing with the GTX260. And according to system benchmarks, the GTX 260 (55nm) outputs about 25% faster pixel fill rate and 33% faster texture fill rate to the 4870, given stock speeds...
[citation]http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=604&card2=564[/citiation]... yes, the Radeon trumps the GeForce in core clock competency and memory bandwidth, but even a pretend overclock in the GTX260 can mitigate the bandwidth. The sheer power of the core on the 4870 is why I mentioned Physics. Higher end processing would be in the Radeon's favor, but for sheer pixel/texture output, it's the GTX's game.

Of course, it all comes to a wash anyway. Personally, i.e. in my opinion, I seriously believe the GTX 260 (55nm) will do better with continued driver support. Like I said: What's the problem with ATI's lineup matching so?

But now I'm curious to see a review of the GTX 260 performance vs the 4870 given current drivers.

That article is almost a year old, and does not take into account recent driver improvements (for both cards), not to mention it's comparing the 512 MB 4870 to the 65nm GTX 260 192 Core. Want to compare these apples to tire irons?

My apologies. That was poor board code.

There's the link again, this time working. No edit that I could see - but I don't post too often here.

Isn't every computer company down with that.

I'd probably get a 4870 if I had something to do with my old 8800 GTS. But since my GTS still runs fine and I can play most games on completely high settings, and I'd probably need a new higher resolution monitor to justify having a 4870, I'm going to pass until I decide to rebuild a new computer.

Agreed, and their going to trade blows quite a bit. Looks like nvidia did some price slashing of their own. The 260s were generally 30-100 dollars more than the 4870s, now their about the same price.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] rder=PRICE

I'd be in for an nvidia 295 if it was $150 no ATI for me.

Ew dual card im waiting for 200 buck 285 then ill get rid of my old 8800gts 640

AMD/ATI are simply destroying Nvidia with these prices, HD4870 is much better than the gtx260, it should cost a lot more than that.

Anyone buying a card from Nvidia now must be very uninformed about the performance of those cards.

what AMD's partnors really mean "we feel that consumers should continue to pay us the same money they always have and we should be allowed to charge them out the butt for a card that they should really be paying less for"


i mean seriously not that the 4870 is a bad card but it's jsut not a top teir card any more and it especialy wont be when ati releases their next chip wich is likely soon, I think more often than not teh "partnors" of both ati and nvidia are the sole reason that top end cards have gotten so ridculously overpriced... ask me i think nvidia and Ati shoudl go back to making thier own cards perhaps then we would see graphic cards go back to a reasonable price. as things are now i'm getting pushed more and more back to console gaming because the enormously "rich" price tag that upper mid and top end cards come with.

phyxs is NOT a Graphical thing !!!!!!!!!

there should be no visual differnce usin g it what so ever other than a frame rate difference. which clearly does happen on titles that use phyxs. on my gf 9600 gt before teh physx drivers i was seeing 35-45 fps on UT3 now i see around 55-75 frames per second with the physx . perhaps mirror's edge doesn't really amke good use of phyxs ??? got to remember for a technology to really show it's use, you have to have people that competantly code for that tech.

PhysX is NOT a burden ... have youe ver actuallyr ead any articles about it , or you jsut another fanboy ????

it offloads all or part of the physics processing off the cpu, that way a larger percentage of the game data is being executed by the faster bussed GPU , instead of the slower bussed CPU. Which acutally INCREASES your frames per second, it doesn't decrease them.

AMD cannot compete at equal prices to nVidia because nVidia has a bigger base. Pricing their products similiar to their actual competition would just mean less sales.

*sigh* I've been waiting a week for the price to drop. I've got a pile of stuff I'm picking up from newegg, but if they aren't going to drop this price, it's time to reconsider other cards and look for lower prices.

4830 512 90$ - 15 MIR = 75$
4850 512 135$ - 15 MIR = 120$
GTS250 512 = 130$
4870 512 170$ - 15 MIR = 155$
GXT260 896 180$ - 20 MIR = 160$

Judging by the first benchmark I pulled up you could argue any of the prices 10$ in either direction depending on the games you play. I don't see a fundamental problem though. Prices based on Mail in Rebates does suck and I hate them. Also I generally stick to certain brands, but the cheapest cards listed pretty much match the price points.

(p.s. Mail in rebates should not be legal the way they are. They should be structured in a way for vendors to do it, then the list price would be the actual F@(8ing price.)

Where's the proof? Look at benchmarks, the cards trade blows across the board. Crysis? GTX 260 wins. Left4Dead? 4870 wins. Which games at which resolution are you playing at? The GTX 260 Core 216 and Radeon 4870 1GB are both great cards, at the same price point, with similar performance, which is the best thing that could possibly happen for us, the consumers. Why is that so hard for everyone to grasp? Please, please, please be objective in your statements; opinions are fine to state, but not when they are stated as facts.

Scrumhalf is right on the account of opinions and facts, all of the tech websites I have seen appear to be subject to this problem. So giving basis to your argument is a good idea, eg. citing a reputable source to back up your statement. With regards to the scaling of SLI and Crossfire for all cards, the best article I have seen is here:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3517 (2 GPUS)
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3518 (3 GPUS)
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3520 (4 GPUS)
Really sorry to quote andantech on this one, but it is the most extensive I have seen to date. Toms has some excellent articles on SLI and CF, but they are mostly card specific.
Where most other sites fall through the cracks is by comparing performance on completely different platforms, (which was a must before X58 anyways), and I have seen SLI comparisons to CF, where the CPUs where different and even in some cases where one was OC'ed and the other not. So it is crucial to check that the test setups are the same (or comparable for non-X58 setups). Example of this is the fact that an SLI setup with 2X GTS250s on a 780 mobo with a Q9550 is probably gonna rock a CF 2X 4870 on a 790GX mobo with a phenom 9950 in almost any game bench, but if both GPU solutions are on an X58 with a 4.0 Ghz OC'ed 920 i7 - things will probably look a lot different.

Another important thing to consider on game benchies is CPU overload. If the CPU is too weak for the bench its gonna seriously mess up your results with regards to GPU power, because instead of measuring GPU power you will be measuring how well you're cpu copes with a particle GPU overloading it with data.

Ideally if you just to test pure GPU power relatively (i.e. which GPU is the fastest) you have to at least try to exclude the CPU as a factor - which means using the beefiest CPU to date.

If you want to know how well the GPU works for real world consumers however, you gotta to test it with the CPUs and setups that these customers are likely to buy.

And that folks is why the benchies can get highly varying results - which leads to contradictory outbursts such as

"The 4870 is one hell of a card, and people who actually bother buying the GTX260 for more money are wasting it."

"...Crossfire scales way better than SLI anyway...."

As stated above by others it is:
1. Important to back up these claims with benchies - i.e. Are you selling me wolf tickets?
2. Be aware of the test systems in those benchies - i.e. Are they really comparable?
3. Be aware if they were "real world" or "ultimate" tests. - i.e. Is this the performance I can expect on my system?

I'm still having a hard time trying to understand why the partners want to keep the old price for the 4870 when they could sell a lot more of those in a short time span before (maybe) the next gen comes.

As a consumer, i don't like the idea of keeping that price tag when AMD says "let's lower it a bit!", sounds like bad enterprise practice or just a coalition with nVidia (hello weird theories) so they don't get the sh*ft.

Anyway, i love when AMD pushes nVidia! At least price wise, lol. Hail to the consumer!

Esop!

I have a 4870 and it is incredible value for the money. However, I just made a second computer with a 9800GTX (125 with free COD5, was going to buy COD5 for 50 bucks anyway ) and the one thing nvidia has on ati is this. The badaboom converter is amazing. Right now the avivo converter is horrible compared to the badaboom. I ripped a dvd to my iphone in 8 minutes, something that would've been done with less quality in 30 using my 3.6ghz dual core. I am planning on going crossfire but I really wish that ati put more effort into their converter.