This thread is awesome, some comments are good, but its rife with so many stupid ones its great. This is my first official post (after months of trolling, i only registered yesterday), hopefully not my last.
I would start by saying apoppin, i'm on your side on this and would luv to see the benchies soon. Hopefully my rig specs come up when i post.
I being a man of logic (as all men are), am not all that impressed by HardOCP's shoddy review techniques (and i will elaborate don't worry).
So, lets see the issues that I have with the Hreview
1. The Hreview deems 60 frames per second (average) as being playable...hmm ok, everybody knows that its the user that decides what is playable for them and what isn't (75 might be good for fps - especially in multiplayer; you be fine with 40 for rpgs - whos knows, its your eyes right).
2. Now just think about it like this; how many possible combinations (i don't think permutations would come into this) of the resolution, AA level (and AA type in the case of ATI), AF level, in game setting levels (which are too many to list here probably, e.g. filtering, sound, detail etc etc etc) will give you 60 frames per second in a particular game, i'm confidently betting more then one. Some people might prefer higher res (like me 24" of 1920x1200 goodness) and can live with AA being at 2X instead of 4X and others might prefer to game at a lower res with all the bells and whistles turned on. All I'm saying is theres a multitude of combinations that might give you a playable value
If there was no bias Hreview should have given the reader every single combination of settings which gave a playable framerate (whateva that is), but they were too slack to do that, or rather took the liberty to choose one to present.
On top of that, i'm reading a lot of negativity from people about the ATI in general - basically, you've all wholeheartedly accepted the Hreview with praises all round. I just read a post on this exact site about the many issues with Nvidias 320mb 8800 gts card - and apparently its happening to a lot of people (wasnt' mentioned in the Hreview)
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2059101&enterthread=y
As to the choice of choosing either card...hmmm I choose neither, I think this generation of cards has been kind of screwed over by microsoft AND game developers.
Nvidia came out with dx10 cards (but no dx10 drivers) early, so you could all continue playing dx9 games on. ATI came out with dx10 cards late (some people are screaming 7-10 months late! here as a reason why the card should be better). How can a card be "late" if theres no dx10 games to play on it, you guys are scrounging for nuts here by testing out dx10 demos here and there (whateva you can get your hands on) in an effort to say which card "might" be better in dx10.
Anyways on to my final point - i'll go into the debate about the 2900xt thing in future posts
I've gone through a lot of forums, and one thing that strikes me is that (you guys all love computers thats a given, but come on you know i know that we make up such a small percentage of society) is that even most posters in forums don't generally run monitors above 1650x1080 (i havent' seen all that many go up to 2560). So just imagine sort of setup a casual gamer has.
And don't give me that those guys don't really matter when it comes to video games, just look at the top ten best selling games ala firingsquad (WOW, sims and mostly sims expansions), so either the number of people playing these other pc games is quite lower, or theres a lot of piracy going on (hmmm).