Caporegime
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 33,188
tis a shame that $379 into pounds with 15% vat is only £270, looks to me like some "we have the first cards, pay us 10% more for the privilage" pricing going on 
As for scores, its hard to show full performance ever frankly, game optimisation and a year or more of driver improvements change a cards performance drastically.
At this stage i'd expect a pretty hefty wedge of performance still to come from teh 5XXX series and pretty much no performance improvements anymore from 4XXX or Nvidia cards.
But then you've got, new games, in dx10.1/dx11 where the gap will widen and as performance in newer games pushes cards, the 5XXX should have power to burn, even more so with driver improvements, while the Nvidia cards should start to be pushed.
We've always had diminishing returns and lets be honest, theres few games now a 4870 can't handle well, let alone a 4890/gtx 285 or any dual gpu card.
If you're buying a £300(£270
) for old games that already play more than well enough on cards half the price just for the sake of pushing your FPS up while not improving your gaming experience in the slightest, well, its not a smart thing to do.
I buy newer cards so when better games come out I don't play them, decide performance sucked and have a worse experience than I should have.
Which is why, due to early pricing and nothing new out just yet I'll most likely wait till before a couple big and demanding games are out.
The biggest issue is price, not least from gouging but from a crappy low yield process. something like 100 of these cores can fit on a $5k waifer from TSMC on 40nm, call that $50 a core as they come out, make some profit and they are selling them for $80-90 a core, and its easy to make a $250 dollar card. Now cut yields to 50% (or less) and you're suddenly looking at the cost doubling to $100 per core as they come out, they have to sell it for more to break even, than a better yield can be sold for a profit
Which is why Nvidia are going to be in a horrific position with their huge cores.
These might not beat Nvidia cards by enough for the price shown, but ouch, Nvidia cards are unlikely to come close to doubling performance while they are going to cost significantly more to break even, or be sold at a loss.
This might be the first generation I wait till the 5870x2 and possible 5890 is out, to push prices down, hope for better yields and for harder games to be out.
As for scores, its hard to show full performance ever frankly, game optimisation and a year or more of driver improvements change a cards performance drastically.
At this stage i'd expect a pretty hefty wedge of performance still to come from teh 5XXX series and pretty much no performance improvements anymore from 4XXX or Nvidia cards.
But then you've got, new games, in dx10.1/dx11 where the gap will widen and as performance in newer games pushes cards, the 5XXX should have power to burn, even more so with driver improvements, while the Nvidia cards should start to be pushed.
We've always had diminishing returns and lets be honest, theres few games now a 4870 can't handle well, let alone a 4890/gtx 285 or any dual gpu card.
If you're buying a £300(£270
) for old games that already play more than well enough on cards half the price just for the sake of pushing your FPS up while not improving your gaming experience in the slightest, well, its not a smart thing to do.I buy newer cards so when better games come out I don't play them, decide performance sucked and have a worse experience than I should have.
Which is why, due to early pricing and nothing new out just yet I'll most likely wait till before a couple big and demanding games are out.
The biggest issue is price, not least from gouging but from a crappy low yield process. something like 100 of these cores can fit on a $5k waifer from TSMC on 40nm, call that $50 a core as they come out, make some profit and they are selling them for $80-90 a core, and its easy to make a $250 dollar card. Now cut yields to 50% (or less) and you're suddenly looking at the cost doubling to $100 per core as they come out, they have to sell it for more to break even, than a better yield can be sold for a profit
Which is why Nvidia are going to be in a horrific position with their huge cores.
These might not beat Nvidia cards by enough for the price shown, but ouch, Nvidia cards are unlikely to come close to doubling performance while they are going to cost significantly more to break even, or be sold at a loss.
This might be the first generation I wait till the 5870x2 and possible 5890 is out, to push prices down, hope for better yields and for harder games to be out.
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)
OC is selling them for £298 [only a smallish gouge!
].
