Going by previous production runs you'll be hard-pressed to get the card you want after release date. There's always a huge gap between supply and demand for new cards. If you can find a good seller myabe you should look at pre-ordering your card. If it was me though, I'd use my current GPU until SoW was out.

Thanks Guys,

I meant lower relative to the 6990/5970 :)

With the XFX 5870 around £260 I could squeeze to £300 if I felt it was worth it but not for a 480GTX with its power and heat issues. It does seem to outperform the 5870 by something like 5-15% depending on make/game/settings but I'm hoping the 6950 will match or beat it for less money and perhaps even the 6970 price won't be far off. It's hard to tell from a 'roadmap'.

I don't think that's true, from the performance roadmap I think the 6850 replaces the 5770 and 6870 replaces the 5850. Also, this from Tomshardware on the 6000 series...
"But there’s one more critical component to performance, and that’s clock rate. Despite the re-use of 40 nm manufacturing, at 900 MHz, the less-complex Barts GPU runs much faster than the 5830, or even the 5850. This means geometry throughput is almost 25% higher than the 725 MHz Radeon HD 5850 because it’s limited to one primitive and one vertex per clock cycle. At the same time, the 6870’s texture unit and ALU deficit (compared to the 5850) is offset by a higher core clock, resulting in roughly the same overall performance."

Now I'm no expert so talking primitives and vertexes doesn't mean much to me so I just look at the performance charts (and not necessarily just benchmarks). In terms of market section we shouldn't let price=performance. The 6000's are in a lower price bracket for about the same performance or to put it another way more bang for the same buck.

That's more or less what I am doing. If the right card comes out at the right price before SoW and if there's not much chance of the price dropping by much and if I could see I couldn't afford the next level up (they don't drop dramatically in a year) I'd just go ahead and buy it. But, really, we could be waiting another year for SoW.

On my new PC with ATI, if I run 10.9 or above, I get the blocky text bug. 10.8, no problems

Do you mean for the cards originally listed the new drivers are a long gone problem?

Here, in my old PC with ATI card, if I run 10.10 or above, I don't get blocky text bug...

:cool:

Well that's why I ask about the cards :)

I'm running an ATI Radeon 5700 @ 1 gig, in a system with 8GB Ram and an i7 870

If I run 10.9 or above, I get blocky text. If I run 10.8 I am 100% good

By only changing driver versions, I can get blocky text, or fix the blocky text. I can do this at will, depending on driver version

Since This is the sole change I make, and I can reliably introduce the problem by choosing a driver and reliably get rid of the problem by choosing a driver, the only conclusion is it's driver-dependent, given my hardware

So that's why I'm interested if the info given that 'problems are fixed post 10.8' applies to just the cards the OP states, or what

My laptop is i7 720 1.6GHz, 5850 Mobility and 6Gb RAM. It had 10.6 drivers and blocky text in IL-2. I installed 10.11 and its all sorted.

Runs IL-2 very nicely.

Is the 10.11 a beta? I admittedly haven't looked for a couple months because 10.8 solved my problem. I'd love to advance beyond 10.8 but it was such a PITA to get my troubles sorted- ATI drivers don't like to go away! Not hard to fix really but too much time wasted erasing drivers, re-installing, etc

Xmas is coming and perhaps a graphics card with it. I had many severe problems with both ATI and NVidia cards in the past four years. Budget is limited. Probably ATI HD 6870 if nothing else appears until then. The ATI "Cayman" seems interesting if it is very high performance for the cost. But how fast will it be? Heard rumors of 30-50% faster than 6870. At what cost?

When SoW comes out, I'll just have to hope that whichever I went with can handle it okay.

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles...easenotes.aspx

Curiously the AMD website does not list drivers for the 6000 series yet.

Perhaps your method of updating is incorrect? It is easy to lose your way during the process.

Basically it's only necessary to use the Ati Catalyst Install Manager. Access that via Start/ Control Manager/ Uninstall or Change (Win 7). Highlight the above Manager and click Change, then select the Express uninstall option in the resulting window. Once complete carry out the requested reboot.
Once rebooted, find the new Catalyst Install.exe (that you downloaded before the above, right? ;) ) and execute. Allow the process to run, allow the new folder to be created, and then reboot when asked to. This should bring you back to the previous settings of your desktop.
There is no need to mess with registry settings or manual deletions - this can cause more problems than it solves.

B