Actually, at launch, the 4870, in price terms, was head to head with the 9800 GTX, which it absolutely crushed in gaming performance. I don't know how many of you can recall memories from 10 months ago, but they then slashed the price of the 9800 GTX to put it into competition with the 4850 (which at the time still beat it marginally), then they brought out the 9800 GTX+, which for a number of months remained more expensive than the 4850. And also the price of the GTX260 to compete with the 4870.
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Dx10.1 Vs Dx10 - performance video
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Nvidia's strategy is to go for the Halo cards - the fastest, most expensive performance in everything. ATi's strategy is to design one basic core, and produce different iterations of it, maximising profit by volume at the lower end of the market.
Single cards are obviously supposed to compete with single cards - hence the pricing of the 4870X2, which was around as expensive as the 280 when it was on sale. Hence the pricing of the 4870, which is the same as the GTX260 and has similar performance. SLi is a whole different kettle of fish. I even recall ATi admitting they had nothing to go up against the 280; suggesting that people put two 4870s in CrossFire, before the X2 launched.
Before the dust settled, if anything the 4850 was intended to rival the 9800GTX which was shipping at around £150 at the time. It was available in the market before the 4850 launched, so ATi's engineers would have been stupid not to notice Nvidia already had a £150 price point part, and that the new GT200 from Nvidia would be a fair bit faster. Releasing the 4850 to battle the 260 doesn't make sense.
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20+% is hardly SMALL. Considering it's standard for ATi and isn't costing anyone any extra over a DX10 only part, whats the problem with a 20+% boost?
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Like these new cards, balls to spending £60+ for a few extra frames, why not just turn some shadows down or something
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Heh, tell that to the people who paid an extra £50 in some cases for a 9800 GTX over an 8800 GTS 512MB for a 5% (on average) performance boost.
Soldato
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lol its not as simple as that
ati were hitting the market inbetween nvidia's cards by giving performance for value.
the 4850 wasn't meant to be better than the gtx260 it was meant to give a performance for money ratio better than the 260 as was the 4870 to the 280.
then nvidia released the 216 to fight the middle ground with 4870.
ati were playing on peoples value for money as the gtx280 really wasn't worth it in comparison to a much cheaper 4870 that ran the games people wanted very well. the 4870 was a hit because of this.
I love how this thread has gone off at a total tangent...
At release the 4870 was matching blows with the 280 and the 4850 was right on the heels of the 260, but the big bang drivers put paid to that and ATI has been on the back foot ever since. When they saw they couldn't win toe to toe they took the smart route and played bang for buck and it hasn't done them too badly. At the end of the day tho their arcitecture is both a blessing and a curse.
At release the 4870 was matching blows with the 280 and the 4850 was right on the heels of the 260, but the big bang drivers put paid to that and ATI has been on the back foot ever since. When they saw they couldn't win toe to toe they took the smart route and played bang for buck and it hasn't done them too badly. At the end of the day tho their arcitecture is both a blessing and a curse.
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I loved how ATI release the 4850/4870 last summer and it forced NV to get sensible with prices for a while. But 6 months later both my ATI cards were sold for GTX260-216's as ATI has terrible driver issues. You may never even notice these but when/if you do & or it affects games you play then its time to switch. If ATI could put the same financial resource into drivers as NV then they would be no1 but its obviously not that simple and NV lead in this area so even though DX10.1 is faster in some games I would still prefer NV as they give more consistent realworld gaming experience & have stronger developer support (still!!).
ATI cards are great but they cannnot convince developers to adopt 10.1 so its going to get swallowed up by DX11 as NV are better at politics and writing drivers.
ATI cards are great but they cannnot convince developers to adopt 10.1 so its going to get swallowed up by DX11 as NV are better at politics and writing drivers.
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ATi on the back foot, rofl, its the other way around.
I repeat, when the 4800 series were launched, they were aimed at the 9800 GTX and 8800 series. Only R700 was meant to compete with any of the GT200 cards at that point - they were priced accordingly, until Nvidia took the axe to their pricing.
On the note of driver performance, when the cards were first launched, things were reasonably similar to what we see now. The 180 'big bang' drivers came out, which gave Nvidia a reasonably large advantage in a few games came out, then there was a short period of time before ATi came back with the 8.12/hotfix drivers which pretty much levelled the playing field again.
That said, at the moment, GTX260-216 vs. 4870 1GB? I'd get the 260 because it's cheaper. No question. not because of CUDA, PhysX or people believing the drivers are better (falsely, IMO), just because they're similar cards with different prices.
Soldato
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ATi on the back foot, rofl, its the other way around.
Absolutely hillarious
I can't believe what I am reading here. It's so predictable certain people discounting ATi's featureset but Nvidia's let's face it currently useless PhysX (and will probably be gone when OpenCL comes around) is amazing in comparison...
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People thinking that the hd 4850 was meant to rival the gtx 260 and hd 4870 the gtx 280? The hd 4870x2 was meant to fight the the gtx 280 at the $499 price bracket. There are even reviews comparing those 2 cards directly. After the hd 4870x2 blew it away, ati inreased the price to $549 on release.
The 9800gtx specifically came out to combat the hd 4850. No one said it was supposed to fight the gtx 260. I know because I bought the card on release after reading extensive reviews. people have terrible memories. People were just surprised when in certain games these card were beating cards much more expensive than them.
The 9800gtx specifically came out to combat the hd 4850. No one said it was supposed to fight the gtx 260. I know because I bought the card on release after reading extensive reviews. people have terrible memories. People were just surprised when in certain games these card were beating cards much more expensive than them.
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Depend which card you use - most Nvidia are 10.0 and some of ATI are 10.1 so next new Nvidia GT3xx due by Q4 2009 get DX11 for Windows 7 (maybe Vista SP2 get DX11 or not). I wait until next year when W7 release then I get new card - remember games have to be included DX11 support that may not very much to sell into market - i have 2 games that run DX10 (free with XFX GF 9600GT XXX card). Yes it look nicely and very smooth, some monitors are now fitted HDMI instead of DVI.
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Just imagine how much better all games would be if ATI were not holding games back by ignoring PhysX support... er.. I mean Nvidia and DX10.1
(sorry fella couldn't resist a cheeky one there
There both as un-important as each other, no-offense to Nvidia but PhysX isn't really anything to brag about and the same goes to ATI with DX 10.1
Like these new cards, balls to spending £60+ for a few extra frames, why not just turn some shadows down or something
+1, wait for the next line of cards from both ends, probably the next performance range or Directx 11 which is coming in Q4. A 4870 is enough to play any game until then.
Well this thread is getting predictably interesting..
rofl
Absolutely hillarious
LOL! big bang drivers come out... ATI took over a month to respond with 8.12 which almost caugh up again performance wise... at which point nvidia bought out another driver set which gave 7-10% gains across the board... and guess who took almost a month to come out with a driver that caught up again? and again and now we see 182.xx and 185.xx drivers out with more big gains - in some cases more than 40% performance gains... ATI will no doubt respond in their next driver release... but when was the last time you saw them push out drivers with a performance increase that wasn't in reaction to a performance increase from nVidia?
Physx useless? under used maybe... only someone with bias or of limited intelligence would call it useless.
and you not bias give it a rest
I disagree - nvidia had a working, stable and feature rich hardware physics implementation up and running in a matter of weeks... and it is something that game developers are interested in. I wouldn't call DX10.1 unimportant either some of the stuff like SSAO has huge potential... but outside of the few game studios that are being pressured to use it by ATI theres very little real useage or interest in it at this time. By the time most developers need these features to be able to implement things in a game we should have DX11 available and GPUs that can effectively use these features for best effect rather than in a limited highly specific fashion.
Not really - use the search function you'll see how many times I have commended or reccomended ATI for other reasons... I've often shown the 4870 as a worthy alternative to the 260 in many of the threads where people have asked for advice...
I'm mostly skeptical of their ability to deliver what game developers actually need right now which nvidia tends to get right more often hence my preference in that direction at the current time.
I am most certainly less bias towards nvidia than people like rafster and lightnix are to ATI.