sick... just confirming that the gtx280 is going to win...

"the 4870 X2 will face stiff competition from the geforce gtx 260."

omfg... the gtx 280 should completely rape it then Now i'm psyched

Yes... stiff competition is the same thing as completely raping it...

Pricing and power efficiency are going to be right up there in my purchase decision along with performance.

I want real benchmarks... why won't anyone provide benchmarks, I wants it

well the 260 is the lowend nvidia card so yes the 280 should rape the 4870x2 according to this article

jevon... according to you do you mean the 4870 X2 should rape the GTX 260... cause the way they word it, it implies that the gtx 260 will even beat the 4870 X2...

so elaborate please

According to this article which has no real performance numbers. Wouldn't be surprised though.

well I woudn't be surprised if the 4807x2 is 10-20% faster than the GTX280.. based on those 'leaked' vantage scores. I think this article focuses only on the prices. (and as we know nvidias chip is one expensive piece of silicon)

"sick... just confirming that the gtx280 is going to win..."

This is completely false. They are talking about competition based on price, not by performance. No one has any idea yet what the performance competition is going to be. I would hope the GTX280 would win, That chip has the same die size on a wafer as 3-4 R770 chips and will use more power than the 2 chip solution. If it doesn't win though.... bad news for nvidia.

So does this mean that it'll be hard to get a 4870 early on? They said they plan to ship in volume sometime in the summer. I'm hoping to get one in early July....

how is the GTX260 Nvidia's low end card? It would be better to be placed in the upper-mid category, Considering that it is relatively close to the price of 2 of ATI's high end GPUs. IMO from what has been seen with the vantage scores (not proven) is that the GTX-280 is not much faster than the GTX-260.

vantage is just that...

its a benchmark for cards... ati almost always does better in 3dmark and even if you score terribly... that doesn't mean that your system sucks or is only 20% better than a rival card when infact it could be much greater... its just that rival card might be better suited to the tests in the benchmark

Don't forget Nvidia is paying big game developers like EA to optimize their graphic cards. Just look at Assassins' Creed. ATI will not hold his place against Nvidia in majority of games. Even though it might score better in benchmarks.

I have been a fan of ATI for a while now. Even if they don't always have the fastest fps I have never had one fail and I have enjoyed excellent picture quality. I used to be a devoted GeForce user but I think after 2 dead cards I am done with them no matter the fps race.

you must be really smart

Rape it or not ... we have no benchmark in this article or from any other credible source! What is known ( or likely to be true) is that the GTX280 and GTX260 look like solid cards ( from architectural stream processor viewpoint and related frequencies) and might overtake the R700 architecture. But this is still just speculation. Anyway if you are not ridiculously rich root for ATI because TSMC might keep rising prices. What that means is Nvidia charges more and ATI charge more but ATI has the advantage because they start from a lower price point.

It looks like hardcore gamers don't really care about price. I already know 10+ ready to ship out 1800+ dollars for 3xGTX280 to replace their 3X8800Ultra. The people who are low at budge probably won't care and they are not that profitable for both ATI and Nvidia.Poor folk like me can only pick up the 8800Ultras they about to trash.

cant believe you are buying in to this gtx 280/260 crap, i like ATI but the 2900xt was a hot running bit of crap and it looks like the 260/280 is going to be as well i would never put it in my system but what do i know i just like a cool running system. ha ha nvidia fans hope it smarts

Did I miss the memo where a card estimated to debut at $449 is "low end"?
Like Tommy2005, I'm mostly waiting for these new cards to launch so I can upgrade to an even cheaper current-gen card. I look forward to these new launches to also take advantage of whatever passes as mid-range these days. The $200 3850-512mb, when it debuted, was faster and less power consuming than my $400 x1950xtx I bought a year earlier (and still use... still a great card that gets me everywhere I want to go... but I really need to get around to getting my GF an upgrade from her 7800GT )
I figure this stage in the war is going to be more of the same. The highest end nVidia will ultimately have the fastest overall card, like they already do, so what?
Once the nVidia card ships, I figure ATI/AMD will drop the price as per usual.

That is insane that we spend $300-500 dollars on video cards. Not to mention CPU upgrades, water cooling, MB etc. etc. This is an expensive hobby.

Can't wait for the 4870 X2's!

Well the Nvidia cards have been much better than ATI cards in Vantage benchmarks. The 3dmark06 thought is different story. There Ati has the lead. All, in all the situation is the same as with games. Some games are better suited to ATI's gpus and other to Nvidia, same goes with benchmarks.
It's best to see wide variation of test and as someone said. Nvidia has very tight hold on gamedevelopers, so many game is tailored to Nvidia architecture.

The new NV card may not even make it to retail ...

How many ROPS is the 4850 ... that is the area NV have been killing ATI.

regardless of which card is faster, i'm just going to buy whichever one is going to be cheaper; probably the ATi. I'm not by any means a hardcore gamer, i just wanna be able to enjoy some of the newer games. 30-40fps is fine for me, so i don't need to spend a ridiculous amount of money on something like the GTX280. I'll be very happy with a 4850

Now you are clasifyng people in only two categories = Rich and poor, but it's not reality! there is peoples in mid-class (and most of the people are there!) and what about teen, pre-teens, that have a summer job? they can probably afford a 300$ video card, but the double? only hadcore gamers would (others probably prefer putting this into a car).

An by the way, i know that some people could spare all their money to buy the most expensive graphic solutions, but there is not much of them compared to other people

Can this be tru http://www.hardspell.com/english/d [...] ws_id=3462
That could be very nice!

No, the above link has been around for a while and it most propably is fake...

ATI's graphic cards are only good on paper. It actually performs pretty bad in games. TBH, I am not a fanboy and I have both ATI and Nvidia. The problem is that making a video game is not cheap. The Game developers need to get as much as they can. Nvidia certainly donate a good amount of money to them, so they have to optimize their game for Nvidia in return. Some of the popular titles are also based on OPENGL. which is introduced by Nvidia. That is why most games play best on Nvidia card. ATI's lacking of performance for Single card solution also hurt his marketshare. TBH, most people don't have dual card setup. Maybe 5% of the total gaming population has dual card setup. That is why the majority of games can't take the full advantage of dual card. BTW, lots of games nowsday are really made for game consoles, so optimize for single card solution is a priority for the game developers. They won't waste their time and money for 5% of the market share.

nVidia does a good job of donating technology with better support to developers than AMD does, this is very true and I can speak for that in personal knowledge. If you're arguing the role of game consoles then consider the fact that it's an ATI card that is in the Xbox 360, arguably the most popular console, so, logically X360 games that translate to the PC should play better on ATI's.. right? No. You're partially right on the nVidia front. Generally the product better supported by the developer is likely the one to run better. ATI support is generally considered as an afterthought leaving it up to the driver developer to make sure everything works. ATIs technology is fine, but it's driver support is often what really strangles their performance, as evidenced by the fact they release a driver like every few months, yet despite that, they remain competitive. To say they "perform pretty bad in games." is way off base. So far it's not even in the same state, let alone city, as the ballpark where the base originally sits. Do they perform worse? Certainly. In a gameplay situation, all things considered, when the bullets are flying, I'm not always noticing a considerable difference between my ancient x1950xtx and my friend's 8800GT, even though he's playing on bit larger of a monitor with a more eyecandy on. It's definitely not so much that I'm chomping at the bit to make a new purchase now, now, now! (if offered one for free however....

What everyone continues to ignore when comparing ATI and Nvidia grpahics performance is that ATI gpu's are designed for DX10 games running on 64bit OS's going back to the 2900xt, which despite being 9 months behind the 8800, was still the first truely DX10 compatible card. Nvidia is still basing designs around DX9, with added DX10 support optimized for 32bit OS's. Assasains creed, as mentioned earlier, gets 40fps minimum average of 55+ in 1680x1050 in dx10 with all setting maxed and 16x AA on my AMD 939 toledo core 4400x2 clocked to 3ghz, with my 2900xt gpu at stock speeds. And i'm running 64bit vista ultimate. If i drop the AA down to 8x i get the same performance at 1920x1200. Take into account that the 3870xt performs about 10-20%, has a fraction of the power consumption and only costs $150-170, nothing to really complain about.

Their are two kinds of people that think ATI just looks good on paper...those still running 32bit OS with dx9 games, and those running 64bit os's with intel CPU's. Yes, intel is the cpu performance king, if you don't mind paying an extra $1000 for 20-30% performance gain. So long as you keep that cutting edge hardware running WinXp...because intel fails in 64bit performance...as well as memory performance....and multi-core compatible software...ya know...just the supposed improvements that 64bit dual/quad core cpu's offer.

My old 939 rig runs both cpu cores equally in full screen apps...like games in 64bit vista..and yes while 32bit vista does offer dx10 compatibility, when it has system memory limit of 2gigs, and the OS eats up 1gig-1.5gigs....it doesn't matter how fast your gpu is, especially if those spiffy 1-3 extra cpu cores aren't being utilised by the most demanding application....and there is only 400-500 megs of ram free.

Crysis, another Nvidia game, runs perfectly fine on ULTRA settings in DX10 at 1440x900, 30fps minimum ,average of 45-50 on my system. Of course, it runs both cpu cores to 100% (with the game eating up 80% of that at minimum) as well as 2.4 gigs of RAM.

ATI's main driver problem was back with the 2900....which had alot to do with the fact that their was still almost NO 64bit vista driver support for most hardware at the time the card was released, and it wasn't intended nor marketed for XP compatibility and use. However..nvidia was plauged with driver problems when the 8800's came out...oh and physical design flaws as well. I have yet to read a review of an nvidia card that doesn't have problems running DX10 games in 64bit OS's, and there is almost the guarentee of SLI not functioning on new cards with the release drivers in one OS config or another.

ATI does more than adequetly, especially for the price, more so when run on intended platforms. And again, it doesn't matter how good your gpu is, if your cpu is bottlenecking the system...or your ram performance is pathetic...or if there just isn't any ram available to access

i had a lot of geforces as well. had no one to fail on me, still, i would never go back to nvidia in a thousand years. after laying my sight on the screen for the first time after my hd3850 purchase, i knew what image quality is. i have this confirmed from other people as well. they say ATI is all the way up there with matrox. sorry nvidia, high prices, low image quality and having to buy a 800w PSU isnt going to get you a customer here

I don't think you've read many reviews, in that case. I'm running 64-bit Vista and I've played almost every DX10 game available with zero problems. Try again.