At last.

I look forward for a passive cooled 4850!

Who wants the review of the europe launched 4850?? it's in French but numbers speeks by themselves, impressive! it beats the 260GTX in many games!!

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/72 [...] -4850.html

draxssab, thanks for the link. You're right, the graphs are understandable for anyone, including those who don't know french. I would say your comment about it beating the 260GTX is quite misleading, however I still got a very positive impression of the card from the review - it is roughly the same at 1920x1200 without AA as a Geforce 9800GTX, and I believe they say 18% faster with AA. In my case, where I live, the 4850 is already in stores at a price of 300 of local currency, whilst the 9800GTX is 470+. This makes the 4850 a GREAT deal for those without huge budgets.

pretty sweet and exactly what i expected, a healthy but stable jump from the last gen. but are there driver issues with AA?

For the reported 200$ ... I would be estatic to get this type of performance from my graphics card. I might now have a reason to chunk by 7800GTX, and re-install (shudder) Vista Ultimate again. Now if only Creative Labs would get some decent driver support for my XFI in vista.

I am curious to see what the benchmarks for the 4870 will turn out. The best part of all of this, competition at last.

Sounds like good news to me

Or just punch it in google translate and most everyone can read it.

Looks decent if priced right.

I can translate the most important points for everyone:
The big GIANT step is made with AA filter, that was an issue in general for the Radeon 2000 and 3000 series. With this filter it sometime pass or equal the GTX 260, and in general it score higher or same as the 9800 GTX.

They underline the fact that in the average, it score a bit higher with Antialiazing than the 3870X2, and 18% more than the 9800GTX (the graph at page 8 is an average made of every games)

They also tell that the card is as silent as a 3850, as the cooler is almost the same (all the cards released yet are "referance" cards, the companies only put their sticker over the AMD ones)

They say that at this price (around 159 euro) no Nvidia cards can compete with it, as the nearest (th 9800GTX) sells around 220euro and often more.

Good deal, sounds like it may be a good time to buy a new card, though I'd wait for the 4870 to see if there are any more price drops.

So I guess the whole, we don't do "soft launches", or the whole hard launch across the board (wasn't that the "story" behind the delays in the last major ATI launch); was a convenient excuse at the time and not a corporate philosophy.

While I admire the 'radical' idea of having products at launch (cough, K10, cough 38XX series); a hard launch would include all the products (4870), they are launching.

That said, ror the money, the 4850 does look like a good card though!

I don't think a "hard launch" has to necessarily include all products in the series. It just means that whatever cards they say they are launching are in stock when they launch. This goes not just for new series of cards, but also for individual cards in general.