A lot of ATI fanz seem to be hoping and praying for that. 🙄
I guess after 4 bad launches in a row...ATI fans need something to hold on to.
4 bad launches in a row?
The 5870 had a hard launch, cards were available on the day of the launch. Same with the 5850 (by the way, 5850's are in stock as of the time of this post at Newegg). Same with the 5970. Same with the 57xx cards. All hard launched. AMD is selling every single 58xx and 59xx they make almost instantly. Obviously they need to work to meet demand, but with zero competition from Nvidia in those segments, and probably none for at least a few months, they have some breathing room.
The 48xx cards were an amazing launch. Almost instantly they cut the price of the competing Nvidia cards in half. That's a good thing for all of us! Comparable cards for a very good price from both camps. I don't know how anyone could call that a bad launch. Infact the launch was so good that Nvidia was running around making 2:00AM calls to announce the 9800GTX+ and they revised the GTX260 to be a more powerful card... I guess they didn't like AMD's $299 card spanking their $450 card. The 48xx cards had a huge impact almost immediately. Pretty good launch if you ask me.
I don't remember many details about the 3870, but I do think that the 3870 was the card the 2900 should have been... DX10.1, UVD, much smaller die, much less heat/power use. The 3870 certainly didn't shake up the industry, but it was competitive at it's price point. Like I said, I don't know if it was hard launched or not, but I know AMD made money during this time period. Nothing earth shattering, but an ok part at it's price point.
The 2900 was a terrible launch. It was much later than the competition (Like Fermi) and wasn't fast enough to justify it's late entry in enthusiast's eyes. The card competed poorly with Nvidia's 8800GTS and ended up really being closer to 9600GT performance. We'll have to wait and see if Fermi will end up being Nvidia's 2900XT...
Anyway, the last two launches have been great. The prior launches, were 'meh' and bad in my opinion.
Actually, no. NVIDIA is launching an new architecture, while ATI is still using its old one. So of course ATI was able to launch faster, but with no so significant performance boost from last gen.
You know why AMD to launch quicker? Because they created the 4770 using 40nm around six+ months ago. They used DX10.1. They've had hardware tesselation for many generations. They've innovated over the course of the last few generations enabling them to create the 5870 much quciker than Nvidia ccan introduce their next gen architecture. Nvidia has to create a tesselator for the first time. They have to jump from DX10 to DX11. They are just now starting to use 40nm. AMD's earilier innovations have allowed them to get the 5870 out quickly. AMD's small die strategy and earlier innovations have payed off.
