meh, AA performance was massively improved a couple months after the 2900xt release, this card is a significantly lower bandwidth card though compared, thats why the gddr4 version that seems to hit 2.4-2.5Ghz in most reviews that overclocked, is worth the extra £10, plus its likely that the 3870 will have higher stock voltage for the core allowing higher core overclocking(hopefully, yet to be seen, is normally the case).
the biggest/main issue with the card is the 16 rops, which, is limiting to say the least on these cards. its like a funnel, craploads of power at the back end, but it all has to go through the damn narrow part and is slowed down/backed up because of it.
but, if you look, the crysis hotfix for ati has done MASSIVE improvements, i mean silly, its performance could well be beating the 8800gt. thing is, ATi tend to get the industry movement right, they called shader heavy cards a few gens ago, and its still the case now. but when seemingly 75% of the triple a titles are backed by nvidia, optimising engines geared to their tech is inevitable. but in crysis's case, it clearly went shader power heavy. the thing is, cards are really designed starting 3 years before release, teams work on two/three different generations at a time. if the industry suddenly goes off on a tangent you can't easily predict it and it would roughly be 50/50 who would win if one company went brute force, and one went all shader power. but when 75% of the main titles are backed by one of the horses, that 50/50 becomes more like 90/10.
this is something that goes against ATi, but 3-4 years ago when "the way its meant to be played" platform really kicked off they should have forseen it and as it was fairly obvious nvidia were putting in more rops/texture units and less shader power, that maybe they should have simply copied it.
