its funny to see ATi boys promoting the 4870X2 and yet ATi failed in delivering the product in a timely fashion to compete with Nvidia! in 1 month the 4870X2 will be already obsolete... and nvidia would have released a newly improved chip of the GTX 280 (smaller die, perhaps DDR5) as they did with the GTX 9800 .
I do prefer Nvidia but I was happy to see ATI/AMD give some great competition. Now with this it's not quite as good as I thought. WTH is with ATI? What good is the card if we can't buy the damn thing?
the right hand doesn't know, but you know :grin: of course it's a bad management, hopefully their drivers won't suffer the same distorted fate... 13th of august? great day for a launch. :devil:
We don't even have a time frame on any revision of the GTX280, and considering AMD has the better card now for the price (4870) I'd say AMD didn't fail at anything.
Yeah, no. It was ALWAYS stated by AMD that the X2 wouldnt be out until between middle of July and the end of August. What you are seeing are some previews of samples and early drivers for the card. They are not end result products. It was like when Anandtech got the first Core 2 previewed 3-6 months before the Core 2 was released. It wasn't a soft launch, but just a look ahead or preview of at minimum how something was going to perform.
I read Anandtech's preview and all I can say about it is how bad it is. Just take one look at the page where they tested GRID and I think you'll all understand.
They purposefully showed the resolution right after the drop off occurred. They basically put the graphics so high that it needed more than 512MB of RAM on the video card. If you take a look at the chart below the graph you'll see what I mean. At the resolution before the one they used the FPS in half the cards are up dramatically. I believe it was purposefully done to showcase the new card.
they typically showed that resolution throughout the benchmarking (with exception perhaps crysis) if they wanted to purposely showcase the card they wouldnt have included crysis, they would have included cod4 or bioshock which runs extremely well on ATI cards. it was shown because previous 4800 cards that were benchmarked at that resolution showed HUGE drop in FPS, it wasn't known if it was a driver thing or a frame buffer limit. according to those results, it was a frame buffer limit (as they did use 2GB card despite wilsons earlier claim of 1GB). it was showing that for ultra high end gaming (which the card is designed for) getting a 2GB (or 1GBx2) will dramatically increase FPS at that high resolution due to frame buffer limit. if there was a 2GB or 1.5GB GTX 280 card, you would likely see the same increase in FPS.
