R600 Arrives At Last!

Poor ATI, the cards not much better than a 8600gts and it cost more than double.

Well, at least they're in the DX10 market now. They can finally satiate the plight of the ATi fanboys on Vista. Now they can gain a little bit of steam and work out the kinks.

Next up is a delayed entry into the mobile DX10 market with another heavily disadvantaged product.

Yeah right... It wants a lot of more juice than nV 8800GTS, but overclocks better... I think.

Will we be getting some 2k mobos too? Any chance of them having Intel processors or has that ship sailed?

So... I guess this means we won't be expecting a price drop from nVidia any time soon? Seriously, its like ATI isn't even TRYING to compete...

Yeah, that's really embarrassing, given how long it's taken. Glad I went the 8800GTX route. =)

Oh Nooooooeeeeees!

Let me be the first to say that if ATI had been able to create a higher-clocked shader segement, they would have the industry in a second. It seems like such a simple thing to do.. perhaps power consumtion limits it, but then that would make the XT in-efficient since it takes more power but give much less performance. Oh, and the 16 TMUs are probably equally problematic.And for all those waiting for the XTX and thinking that it will be what saves ATI, u have to wonder why ATI released this first.

man let the card finally come out it will blow nvidia with its original drivers and will make it look cheap

dude the card is great by technology and performance it is run by cracked drivers the card ships with better drivers and nothing of that technology can nvidia compete the real reviews will prove that

If this card was released 6 months ago, it may have had a fighting chance, but still not really.

^^^Try using punctuation....it really makes reading and writing easier.

After reading the review at Tom's, it looks like ATI might be putting up a little bit of a fight. I was really hoping ATI was going to blow the 8000 series out of the water...maybe next time.

@techno: Every 'real' review out today seems to disagree with you.

Yeh, the reviews also point to the alpha drivers being as good too. So it's performance doesent really seem to be driver-related.

^ On a similar topic, what is with all the ATI fanboys suddenly thinking this is a win for ATI? It is clearly underperforming, and the card is butchered, really.

Im not sure. Its a complete flop, but for a fanboy that means that its good, not great but good.
And the XT actually does pull its weight in a very small ammount of games, such as Half Life 2, but thats only on a few sites.
In any case, the GTS 320 has around the same performance and costs nearly HALF the price(!)

IMO I think the 8800 and 2900 cards are a waste. You can get great performance still from older ATI and Nvidia cards for a fraction of the price. There are no DX10 games out there people and when they start coming out full force in a year or two your old 8800 and 2900 video cards will be old tech will probably not perform that well in newer games. I say skip this generation and wait another year when DX10 games are out and the next gen cards really blow us away!

@anonymous: With the 8800 GTX I can play F.E.A.R. @ 1920x1200 with 4xAA. Thats why its worth every penny.

^^^That's a great idea!!! We should just wait for the newest thing everytime! That way, we will probably never have anything and will look forward to what's next all the time!!!

personally i think that the drivers have a lot to do with this whole mess.

@Track: Exactly my point. Brent is just going off of what nVidia and ATi's PR departments are telling him. Which, as per usual, is not entirely accurate. I get so sick and tired of trying to educate you, but here's an explanation: G80 has 128 SPs, all 128 of them have an extra MUL, and all 128 of them can do special operations. R600 has 320 SPs, and 64 of them can do special operations. Since performance is driven almost entirely by the regular SPs (i.e. floating point MADDs), I don't count the special ops sections as SPs. If we did count it that way, ATi's shader count would be 384, not 320 and nVidia's would be 256, not 128. But again, since performance is determined mostly by the regular SPs, these numbers aren't as representative of actual shader performance.

@Mike: I think u replied on the wrong page.. and i talked to Brent and he confirms that he was just saying what nVidia told him.
Does this mean that i cant even trust what nVidia *dosent* tell me, aswell as the propoganda?

So... if I wanted to upgrade from an x550... should I just wait for a decent card?

I can invest up to %u20AC400 something....

@anonymous: Buy an 8800 GTS 320 - cant go wrong.

Let me restate my post. If you are in the market to upgrade get what ever you want. If you have a mid or high end DX9 card I say stick with it and wait another generation. I bet some of you who purchased the Geforce FX cards wished you had skipped a generation. Also to the guy who runs his 8800GTX at 1920X1200 good for you but that market and running a rez that high is like 1% of the market. Most people don't have high end systems and are running at best 1280X1024 and you don't need such a high end card. I have a 1950 GT and see no reason to buy a new card. My card should be good for another year. Then I can buy the next great thing or pick up a 8800GTX for $100.00. ;-)