By now you may well have heard enough rumblings about RV770 and GTX 280 to make you want to vomit, and if that’s the case we recommend you grab a trash can. In the wake of Computex 2008, a lot more information has come to light regarding the next combatants of the GPU wars. While all of the upcoming products have their own features that we’re excited about, we find it difficult to imagine that the deciding factor for most people will be anything other than price.

Fudzilla has a report we find difficult to believe claiming that both the Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 graphics cards will sport the RV770 GPU with a blasphemous 800 stream processors. Current AMD cards tout 320 such stream processors, while the wildly successful dual-GPU Radeon HD 3870X2 has 640. Needless to say, the notion that AMD has managed to fit enough transistors to support 800 stream processors – more than twice the current count - on a GPU die hardly bigger than the current size is pretty questionable. There are early numbers abound regarding the performance of the Radeon HD 4850, but since we cannot confirm those yet we won’t be posting them. What we can confirm regarding the performance of the card is that it supposedly just about as fast as the GeForce 9800GTX. In and of itself this is not particularly impressive, but given that the 9800GTX currently retails in the $250 range, the thought of a single-slot $200 card based on newer technology seems pretty attractive. Fudzilla also reports that these cards will be able to rock the 1TFlop barrier, which is promising for those of us that run Folding@Home on the GPU.

As far as the GTX 280 is concerned, we’ve seen it running and it is definitely an incredible performer. We won’t quote any performance numbers, since that would be redundant as such information can be found elsewhere. Fudzilla reports that the GTX 280 has 10 banks of 24 stream processors, for a total of 240. These will be clocked at 1296MHz, while the core and memory (1GB GDDR3) will operate at 602MHz and 1107MHz respectively. Physically, the GTX 260 will be nearly identical to the GTX 280, with the only exception being 2 6-pin PCI-e power connectors as opposed to one 6 and one 8-pin. The GT200 core on the GTX 260 will have two banks of 23 stream processors disabled, meaning it will have a total of 192 operating stream processors. They will be clocked at 1242MHz, while the core and memory (896MB GDDR3) will operate at 576MHz and 999MHz respectively.

On the surface, and from what we’ve seen, it looks like NVIDIA’s offerings are in a prime position to absolutely pummel AMD’s cards on the performance end. However, the real eyebrow-raiser here concerns pricing. At ~$200 and ~$300 for the HD4850 and HD4870 cards, AMD seems to have a much better value position. How much better? The GTX 280 and GTX 260 are supposed to cost $649 and $449 USD. That is not a typo. This should be interesting.

Source: Fudzilla

Popularity: 16% [?]

Support FPSLabs! Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google
  • Reddit
  • Slashdot
  • StumbleUpon

You Should Also Check Out These Post:

More Active Posts: