Originally posted by: Rollo
I'm not saying that they should be exactly the same, but performance would be in the same "ballpark"
And the 8500 competed with the GeForce3 Ti series. The Ti4600 competed with the 9700 Pro.
You're an "ace reporter"? Why should performance be in the same ballpark? Is S3/Intel/Matrox/Trident performance in the same ballpark? But nVidia's should be because you say so and it would be better for them if it was? Like I said, they are competing companies trying to gain a competitive edge, and sometimes they will.
The 9700Pro came out 6 months later than the Ti 4600 and would have competed with the 5800 Ultra if TSMC could have delivered as promised to nVidia. In any case, I don't think you can say an 8 pipeline DX9 card that came out half a year later was ever meant to compete with a 4 pipe Dx8 card. It was meant to compete with the nV30.
So, for those 6 months ATIs best product was half as fast at the best FPS game available at the time. We're in a similar situation now:
If HL2 comes out on 9/30, there will be a 3-6 month period where nVidia will be half as fast as it's competitor. I fail to see the difference?
BTW- it used to be ATI that was months behind the product cycle in performance, genereation after generation.
Even with all cheats disabled, nVidia 5900 Ultras have been basically equal performers at all available games for the last 3 months. HL2 isn't out yet, and 3dmark isn't a game. The difference in performance on any game at up to 4x8X could only be seen by benchmarking as framerates are high and fairly equal. 5900 wins some, 9800 wins some.
You people need to get a grip and a hobby other than pimping ATI cards for free. It doesn't help anyway, they can't seem to earn a dime to save their lives.