I just love this:
A) "Why pay $499 for last year's technology?"
1. Because it's still faster in the latest PS2.0 games than NVidia's offering
2. Because it still runs cooler and quieter than Nvidia's offering
3. Because newer technology does not necessarily exceed or better older technology *refer to point 1
4. Because X800Pros are already available in retail and I cannot get my 6800 card even if I paid $1 billion, so if I want the fastest card out right now, I have only 1 choice.
5. Because it's a 1 slot solution and I can run it on a 12A 12V rail power supply.
Also,
B) "Wanted SM3.0 support, but didn't know how to implement it"
- Yeah right, that is why ATI has been the leader since 2002 and is still one today. It doesnt take 3 days to design a new architecture. Right now 3 teams are working on R500, R600 and R800 as has been reported by Dave Orton so I am sure Ati's engineers know how to implement the technology, but they are smart enough not to blow 60 million transistors on a chip that has a useless feature at this point in time. This large die size means greater production costs and more heat. Until we see advantages of PS3.0 which wont come until the next operating system, Nvidia can continue to be ignorant and tell the world how great PS3.0. That is like saying you came up with a replacement for fuel called "XXX" and you have the only car in the world that can run on this chemical. But "XXX" chemical will not be in production for indefinite time (and most likely when it will, all other competitors will have caught up with just as good if not better cars on similar technology => R500+)
C) "Extremely misleading with clock speeds on XT Platinum"
Even so, most review sites received samples clocked at 520/1120 and still for most websites ATI's cards were clocked lower than these values, and they still beat out Nvidias fastest 450/1100 6800UE (which BTW isn't supposed to ever come out because NV is having problems running 6800s at 450mhz + on air cooling). Ati sampled 4 different clock speeds to 4 different reviewers - AND THEY ALL BEAT 6800ultra - great lets move on....
And somehow they failed to mention that after receiving the "overclocked" X800XT cores that Tom has noticed, he manually reset the clock speeds to 520/1120 in his review.
"This allows ATi's cards to reach core clockspeeds of 520MHz (X800 XT) and 475MHz (X800 Pro). Both cards will use GDDR3 memory running at 560MHz (1120MHz DDR) in the case of the X800 XT PE and 450MHz (900MHz DDR) for the X800 Pro. " - Tom's Hardware Guide - where are the overinflated clock speeds that give 3% boost mentioned in the slides?
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