Originally posted by: Keysplayr
Originally posted by: dguy6789
What would the you guys be happier with, a 5870 that costs $600-700+ that was faster than the GTX295 or the $379 5870 that is almost as fast as the $480+ GTX295? While the former might be nice for a handful of people and look nice on paper, it really doesn't get into the hands of most people. How many of you would have bought it if it was $700 but the fastest card on the market? What was actually released is a much more reasonable product that is within the grasp of way more people.
Why the arbitrary $700 figure? If it was faster than the GTX295 I'd wager that people would expect it to cost more money than the GTX295. All Nvidia should do now is adjust pricing. They don't even need to release their new line yet, at least until 5870x2 arrives.
Part of me thought the 5870 would have been more than what it seems to be. Another part thought it would at least be constantly as fast as a 4870x2, even faster because there would be no CF overhead. I thought it should be as fast as 4890's in CF with 100% scaling in all games. But, that doesn't seem to be happening. The bright side is, it is the fastest single core GPU around now. And in CF, two 5870's mostly dominate. And the power savings at idle is a vast improvement over the 4xxx series. Well done AMD.
The beta driver thingy really doesn't hold much water though. This isn't a new architecture. It's a doubling of everything the 4890 was/is with the same 256 bit bus. Expect the standard performance improvements that the last few Catalyst drivers provided for the 4xxx series with the next driver updates. They should have went 512 bit IMHO. But, they wanted to keep their dies as small as possible. So, they made the tradeoff.
Picture AMD making a 128-bit GDDR5 4890. Double it. You get a 256-bit GDDR5 5870.
This card is starving IMHO. They should have just went for the gold and saved the 256-bit bus for their mainstream cards. 5770 or the like.
IMHO