I'm not sure if any of you have been following what's going on with video cards lately.
The news is out there and filled with all kinds of stuff about the new nVidia GTX 260 and 280. What hasn't been really made famous is AMD's new beast.
wiak (fellow WiC player and new forum user) brought this card to my attention.
First off, this card has some insane specs. The 3870 has 320 stream processors, the nVidia 8 & 9 series cards have 128, and nVidia's new GTX 280 has 240. None of these compare to the
EIGHT-HUNDRED that the 4850 has!
In benchmarks that I've seen so far, this card performs better than a 9800 GTX currently, and in some benchmarks, it even out does the GTX 260 and 280. With this amazing performance, you'd think the card would cost a lot, but it doesn't. This card is supposed to
debut next week at a $200 price point!!!
Once this card is out, I'm going to double-check all the benchmarks I've seen and I might pick one (or even two) of these up considering how cheap they are.
AnandTech: ATI Radeon HD 4850 Preview: AMD Delivers Performance for the Masses
Thoughts, everyone? This card definitely has GeForce-killer properties about it. I've never been a person to favor one brand or another; I've always favored the numbers instead.
Also, this is the 4850 that's putting out these results at a $200 price-point. AMD still has a 4870 that they are planning to launch at a $300 price point. Expect this card to spank the new nVidia cards even more.
I just noticed that even though that AnandTech article says the card comes out next week, you can already order it from
Newegg. Some of these cards have up to a $30 mail-in rebate. You essentially can get a card that outperforms a single 9800 GTX card in most cases for as cheap as $170.
