Ati 4850

[SmartDalek]

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.

[Thunderbolt56]

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

[Feuerfalke]

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

[Thunderbolt56]

Here are some more comparison charts from Anandtech:

[Feuerfalke]

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

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

Mamma mia

[Thunderbolt56]

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.