Re: Headlines - Force3D jumps the gun, launches its Radeon HD 4870
It won't, ATi have a card, the low end competes with the 260 fine and the high end, actually edges out the 280gtx possibly, they could well have priced them way up, at £200/300 respectively, or £300/400, but they didn't Ati before the 2900xt release said their gameplan was to move the "high end" segment from the £100-200 bracket basically, they don't want to sell 500k £400 cards, they want to sell 10million £150 cards. The dual core card was I guess the extreme segment, which previously would have been £400-500. Ati could easily, and completely knew the costs and performance of both sets of cards and released with a low RRP, they have no yield issues(unlike others) and shortages + price hikes won't happen as long as, well lets be honest, people don't buy from OCUk when they do it, and they WILL do it.


The physx thing is completely and utterly useless aswell, Nvidia want it to die, its crap technology offering entirely nothing. THe special ut3 levels weren't pretty or good because of Physx, they were good because people spent an ungodly amount of time designing every last breakable wall, thats where the trouble is, and thats why the whole game wasn't the same, because design time right now without a decent engine that can do it all automatically(we are a long way off) is so high that games can only have 1 "special" level. If all levels were the same level of detail it would simply not come out for an extra 2 years.

Not to mention, in this generation, considering the lack of Physx games you'd be looking at wanting the 2nd card mostly for SLi, and secondaryily for Physx, who wants to buy 2x280 GTX's to just sometimes use a couple of levels that use Physx......answer, fanboys, and even they will be detered this generation looking at double the cost for performance as ATi.

Also remember, ATi, and Intel(who only support ATi crossfire and not sli) BOTH support Havoc, and when multi cores with intergrated gpu cores come out in the next couple of years from both companies, meaning every system bought on the entire market supports Havoc, what dev in their right mind will design games for Physx? I can answer, the ones that Nvidia pay enough to do it, but even with a large offer, supporting Physx with next to no users, or supporting Havoc which everyone will have availble to them......... even large wads of cash will not persuade many of them.

With Physx in the market and games supporting "physx" on the box, same way Crysis "optimised for quad core", its just another marketing gimmick but one that you look bad if you don't support. Rather than spending, millions, every year, for the foreseeable future competing with Physx with their own APi, which in the space of a decade will cost them a hell of a lot in R&D and advertising/paying companies to use it, they just bought up Physx, put some loose support behind it, let it die but still save lots in the long run. Cheaper to spend 50mil on a companie and let the idea die(because it was useless and a gimmick) than spend 500mil in 20 years competing, they jumped the gun, infact probably caused AMD to go Havoc and Intel to let them, as Nvidia keep irritating Intel. By making the move, they made it easy for INtel/AMD to gang up on them.Quote

Re: Headlines - Force3D jumps the gun, launches its Radeon HD 4870
We'll see. I rather see price go down than up, but let's not forget that the 8800GT the numerous e-tailers (not only OcUK but also Scan, Play, Ebuyer, Amazon, Newegg and pretty much every stores that originally had the card around RRP) hiked up price by £20 or more due to shortage of supply (and many people were willing to pay the extra cost). What I am saying this, the 4850 is a hot card from a bang per buck perspective, so unless AMD is better at supplying the market than nVidia were, shortage will inevitably lead to retailer mark up. Suppose if demand is indeed 10 million, can they produce that much in the near term? Wait long enough, and price will eventually go down, that's a given. But I am interested to see where the price will be next week.Quote

Re: Headlines - Force3D jumps the gun, launches its Radeon HD 4870
One thing that ATI needs to sort out is their equivalent of CUDA - it could be a bit of a trump card for Nvidia.Quote

Re: Headlines - Force3D jumps the gun, launches its Radeon HD 4870
Heheh, crossfire anyone?

Havok will be ahead of PhysX for a long time, it's got a damn big lead over it for a start - just about every game on the market uses the Havok engine for dedicated physics.

Nvidia will no doubt come back in time, but it's good to see AMD coming out pretty much on top again. It's nice to see that AMD are keeping with reasonably simple product lines, rather than adding on +, GT, GTX, GTS, etc. Don't get me wrong, i love my 8800GT, but the number of models Nvidia bring out each revision is just ridiculous.Quote

Re: Headlines - Force3D jumps the gun, launches its Radeon HD 4870


Same could be said for DirectX 10.1 support on the ATI cards. Both are fairly useless right now. Only UT3 supports CUDA PhysX and Assassins Creed supports DirectX10.1 (without the latest patch)? Either way I don't think we can lose with these prices whatever we choose. :)Quote