Are you running ATI 5870, 6870 or Nvidia 460?

[Triggaaar]

Originally Posted by klem

Thanks Triggaaar,
I had in mind one of the two lower 69xx's.
http://img.hexus.net/v2/pmason/amd/6900/roadmap-2.jpg

That image only has three 69s on it. The 6990 is a dual card, so the 6970 should not be considered a 'lower' card. There's room for a 6930 later, depending on how the cards stack up against nvidia.

I would expect the 6990 to be near or perhaps more expensive than the 580 (I'm scared to look!) as it should outperform the 5970

It definitely will outperform the 5970 (or they wouldn't release it), and it will be more expensive than the 580. It's a dual card. The 6970 will be closer to the 580 in terms of price and performance.

but I'm not sure about the 6950/6970 over the 480GTX (£300 - £400 with 1.5Gb RAM, unless you mean the 480 price will get pushed down).

Although prices always fall, that's not what I meant. You said you'd look at the price and performance of the 6970, but that a 480 was above your budget - that's £300. You won't get a 6970 for less than that in the near future. By the time SoW comes out, who knows.

For comparison, the 6870 is cheaper than it's rivals 5850 and 5870

The 6870 is cheaper than the 5850 and 5870 because it is aimed at a lower section of the market. The 6870 is slower than the older 5870 because the 5870 was a high end card, and the 6870 is mid range (replacing the 5770). I appreciate that when buying a card now, with a given budget, you might compare the 6870 and 5870, but it's not a useful comparison for predicting the price of the next cards.

I would hope the 6950 will sit around or below the 5870 price, and the 6970... ????

When the 6950 is released, it will be faster than the 5870, and more expensive (5870 price will drop). It should be a good card, not long to wait and see.

[klem]

Thanks Guys,

Originally Posted by Triggaaar

That image only has three 69s on it. The 6990 is a dual card, so the 6970 should not be considered a 'lower' card................

I meant lower relative to the 6990/5970

Originally Posted by Triggaaar

You said you'd look at the price and performance of the 6970, but that a 480 was above your budget - that's £300. You won't get a 6970 for less than that in the near future.

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'.

Originally Posted by Triggaaar

The 6870 is cheaper than the 5850 and 5870 because it is aimed at a lower section of the market. The 6870 is slower than the older 5870 because the 5870 was a high end card, and the 6870 is mid range (replacing the 5770).

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.

Originally Posted by Codex

I'd use my current GPU until SoW was out"

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.