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AMD and Nvidia battle for mid-range supremacy
Author: Tim SmalleyPublished: 20th June 2008
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who has the best graphics card of them all?
Over the course of this week, I've been subjected to some pretty heavy marketing messages from both AMD and Nvidia and it's fair to say that we're well past the sleeve-rolling-up stage – the daggers are out and they're being waved around pretty frantically.
As I was preparing to board the plane to Malaga for AMD's Radeon HD 4000-series press event, I received a call from Nvidia to tell us that it was seeding certain websites—including bit-tech—with GeForce 9800 GTX+ cards ahead of their mid-July launch.
Our card arrived just yesterday and Richard was on hand to reveal the details while I was on my way back from Malaga after being out of the country for less than 18 hours.
Nvidia wanted this new card directly compared against the Radeon HD 4850 – my guess was that it was worried. And that's with good reason, because AMD put out some very lofty claims for the Radeon HD 4000-series during the short event in the sunny Costa Del Sol (it was a shame I didn't have time to soak up some sun, as I'm looking rather pale at the moment).
Originally, the Radeon HD 4000-series was completely under cover until next week, but certain retailers in Europe were over-eager to get on with selling the Radeon HD 4850 in particular. They refused to comply with AMD's requests to stop them selling the unreleased hardware, so AMD felt the only thing it could do was to lift the embargo on its performance.
I can't tell you a great deal about the architecture at the moment, but let's just say that it's looking rather impressive and the early (theoretical) performance tests we've done seem to add up, matching AMD's claims. What's more, the price AMD's going to hit has resulted in Nvidia basically dropping its pants on the GeForce 9800 GTX price, and forcing it to pre-announce the GeForce 9800 GTX+ ahead of its mid-July availability date.
The GeForce 9800 GTX price drop is sure to upset anyone that purchased a card in the past few days, but then I guess that's just the technology industry sticking its proverbial two fingers up at you. This isn't the first time that I've seen this happen in my years as a hardware enthusiast.
That said, I'm quite enthused by AMD's new take on GPU design – it's now targeting the price point that it never ever used to get right. Based on what we saw with the Radeon HD 3850, and what we're starting to see with the Radeon HD 4850, it looks like it's causing Nvidia some problems – there were three products that tried to compete with the Radeon HD 3850, and there are already two products going up against the 4850. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we see more coming as time goes by as well...
One thing is for sure now, I've got my work cut out to bring you everything you want to know about these new products in a timely manner – I'm sure there'll be many sleepless nights over the next couple of weeks while we work to bring you enough information to enable you to make informed buying decisions.
Stay tuned for our GeForce GTX 280 coverage shortly, too!
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Comments (22)Stats: 0.166 seconds
Exciting times, but nothing on here! In the end though, i know it's because you guys refuse to rush tests, so it's all for the better :)
We all owe you many beers.
The red team is striking back.. A little over due, but hey. Now, the next most important thing, who's going to get a waterblock out for the 4870 first?
Hell, even the 4850, given its supposed performance at stock clocks..
I had no idea the 9800GTX was SO BIG!
Or, possibly, two 4870X2s if they work with my mobo (X48-T2R... which for some reason doesn't seem to like the 3870X2...)
isn't that a GTX260?
yea, that'd be awesome! But no where near as awesome as ATI getting back up after the knock out blow that was the 8800. Long as performance/price is similiar to 9800GTX I'd rather go with ATI. DirectX 10.1 support and a much cleaner audio over HDMI setup not to mention better at drivers.
Unless i'm wrong on any of that? more GDDR5 please sir
4850 - $199 (less with some rebates from new egg) or £140 (overclockers) in the UK inc. vat
£140 is nearly $280. Vat doesnt account for the difference by a long way.
my god that's good. but come on ATI with your higher end x2, we don't want nVidia stealing all the thunder with their monster gtx280
How long have we been waiting on a decent ati gfx card? NV 6000 Series?
This is a great time to be in the market for some serious GPU hardware, N-Vidia and ATI seem to finally have some price/performance wars kicking in and I look forward to seeing how their products shape up. If there's no clear winner then I'll just save my pennies until I can afford a GTX 280 - but with my luck by the time I've done that it'll be time for the next gen GPU to hit the market.
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