ATI is officially back in the race with the 4850 and 4870 and the pricing is terrific. I will soon be picking one up for myself.

Here is two good reviews. All be sure to view the customer reviews over at newegg.com.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-at...d--powercolor/

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon...-review--asus/

S!

Cheapest price here in Au for a 280 is $730 as against $320 for a 4870.

Opens up how a pair in CF would perform, although I think for most people this would be overkill for IL2, unless you're running a 30" monitor.

Well, there will, no doubt, still be a refresh of both the NV and ATI offerings before any of the sims on my watch-list come to fruition. Accordingly, I'll stick with my current card (8800GTS 512) at least until one or more of them are reported to have gone gold. Then I'll buy or build again.


TB

Wow, the 4870 with 512MB DDR5 Memory is available for 200 Euros, now. :cool:

Here are some more comparison charts from Anandtech:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...lt56/17129.png
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...lt56/17130.png
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...lt56/17131.png
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...lt56/17132.png
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...lt56/17133.png
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...lt56/17134.png
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...lt56/17135.png

http://images.gamestar.de/images/idg...0x600_prop.jpg

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...s/cod41600.gif

Specifications

Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture

800 stream processing units
# Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
# Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
# Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
# 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
# Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
# Up to 160 texture fetches per clock cycle
# Up to 128 textures per pixel
# DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
# High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
# Physics processing support :cool:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Diamond/HD_4870/

Mamma mia :grin:

The price point comparison will surely win back many of the people ATI lost in the last 2 years. The 4870 at $399 compared to the GTX280 at $649 is almost a no-brainer. Especially when you consider the 8800 series runs all current games quite well as long as it's accompanied by adequate CPU power and the 4870 trounces the 8800 series on almost all fronts.

Heck, even the 9800GX2 is a screamer and $200 cheaper than the GTX280...for now.

and ATI is how good in OpenGL? if you plan to buy GPU now and want to have a decent frames in BOB later....also 4850 has that awful cooler....so you must invest in better cooler....also it demands more power....

EDIT: ops it performs well in opengl (at least in Prey) according to this bench...its faster than 8800GTS 512

http://www.interijernet.hr/foto.php?...243&idrf=96428

still...it has awful cooler and demands more power (compared to the 8800gts512)

The difference in OpenGL-rendering is minimal between nVidia and ATI, if there is any left at all with the new generation.

And the cooler, well, the ATI consumes less power and produces less heat. So it can live with the cooler it has, whereas the G280 for example got a lot of remarks during tests, that the cooler is running at max and still barely able to keep it within temperature-tolerances.