Fermi SLI-powered Maingear PC pictured

[bunnyfubbles]

On paper the 4870 should have destroyed the gtx 260 216, but in actuality they were fairly equal performers. I suspect this will be the same with the gtx 360 vs. 5870.

My guess is that the gtx 360 will have an msrp of $399 and the gtx 380 will msrp at $499.

What about the 4870 would lead you to believe it should have destroyed the GTX260?

Higher clock speeds and a bazillion more stream processors.

Classic misunderstanding of hardware architecture... despite the higher clockrate and greater number of shaders, the GTX260 216 actually has clearly superior fillrates, yet the two GPUs perform similarly. If anything the GTX260 216 has the better paper specs.

 

[sawtx]

Higher clock speeds and a bazillion more stream processors.

Yeah that doesn't equate to the 4870 being better on paper than the GTX260, the GTX260 had higher GPixel/s and GTexel/s and they both had similar memory bandwidth. The 4870 had a big lead in GFLOPs but the higher clocks mean nothing when comparing different architectures. I would think the GTX360 might be a little slower than the 5870 based on the rumored specs.

 

[v8envy]

Why no desktop linux? Both ATI and nvidia have pretty good drivers, and even the open source options aren't bad for basic desktop use, at least for older cards.
In fact, ati's drivers have been better in linux lately (for me) than nvidia's.

Well, you're the first person I've ever run across who was able to play hardware accelerated blu-ray content, not have Flash video flickering and tearing, encounter no problems in Wine while all effects in Compiz and KWin function. Oh, and have suspend-to-ram resume reliably. While TV-out is enabled for bonus points. Iconifying windows in less than a second without having to patch or use a downrev X server would be nice too.

The above is not a pipe dream for an 8800GT with the nvidia jurassic-185 blob versions (haven't tried the 192 yet).

When I last tried fglrx (9.11, not sure if there's anything newer) it was still awful. I fired up Oblivion and everyone was black. Eve had random white icons and other weirdness. Locked up X after tabbing out to a text console. Locked up X after enabling/disabling KWin effects. Locked up X after S3 resume.

The radeon open source driver works with KMS, but is barely usable for basic 3d desktop effects and forget wine. Power management on either? Good luck, although it's being worked on in the open source driver as we speak. Video playback is CPU only unless you have the 4 series, not too demanding content and aren't very picky about your red being red and green being green instead of vice versa.

There's more to desktop Linux than functioning in basic framebuffer mode. I don't consider feature parity with a Trident 8900 suitable for a modern desktop machine.

 

[wlee15]

Higher clock speeds and a bazillion more stream processors.

The 4870 has 2.2x the shader power (when you exclude GTX 260 MUL) and 1.12x the bandwidth, but it has only 0.74x pixel fillrate, 0.72x texture fillrate and 0.37x z-rate.

 

[v8envy]

On a sidenote:
http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/16738/38/

Yes another rebrand but if it fits into the proper performance and price bracket why not? It probably is confusing at times though for some people which sucks.

It's worse than that, after I think about it. Before the 8 series even the low end received a notable boost generation to generation. The previous generation high end level performance moved midrange, and previous midrange became mainstream, and mainstream became budget across generational refreshes. If the low end remains identical in performance across generations, what does this imply for the midrange and high end? Rumors and analysis of at least one GT100 variant being roughly equivalent to a 285 in gaming are looking not quite so far fetched from the relabel vantage point.

With the 210 becoming a 310, and 220 becoming a 315 (although you could argue this one is valid) it looks like NV is hoping for the same kind of "upgrade" some customers performed with the 8800 to 9800 generation. Why do this except in hope that uninformed customers fork over for a label-only upgrade? Granted, we can't buy these parts retail -- but like the other low end 200 series it may just be a matter of time.

 

[Schmide]

I don't trust anyone with Marketing in their title they'll say anything and sleep with anyone.

 

[bfdd]

That is one fucking COOL case... btw yay for nvidia? maybe?

 

[akugami]

So basically some guy at nVidia has a couple of engineering samples and it's likely to come out soon? Don't think so. Maybe if it was someone like Anand with an engineering sample then I'd say it's close to being out. Still way too little information on Fermi to say whether it'll come out in January or March.