Nobody knows how fast the 9800-series of cards is going to be, other than a few select people in Nvidia's labs and probably a few developers. And they won't be telling for a good four months' time.
However, we
can benchmark Crossfire-X, thus getting an idea of how fast ATI's next offering is going to be.
However, unless the 9800 is an order of magnitude faster than the current G92/80 hardware, it's not going to have an enormous impact on the market because Crysis will still run like a dog, and that will be the hardest game to run out there for at least another year.
So in the grand scheme of things, yes, ATI have delayed, but it won't make a blind bit of difference to the technical landscape as the gaming market is pretty flat (at this point or for another few months anyway): most benchmarks I've seen have Crysis as the
only game that doesn't give 'acceptable' FPS even with the most expensive hardware. This will be the case for the next generation of games: it seems a lot are using the UT3 engine which runs like a dream on pretty much all high-end stuff. So the marketing bods at both companies don't have much to worry about (slight overstatement, but hey).
If, however, their stuff didn't run well on the Source/Doom3/UT3 engines, they'd be scrambling like anything to get their new stuff out the door.
On the flip side, AMD cannot afford another 2900XT. If this delay means that their new hardware is a 9700Pro, I'm happy to wait. Yorkfield might actually be out by then.
