ATi-AMDhas finally made a compelling new alternative to Nvidia's Geforce 8 series of GPU's: The ATi 3800 Series DirectX 10.1 compatibles with two variants: The 3850 and the 3870. Higher number, better card. No weirdmodel numbers and prefixesto confuse the matter like the Gefore 8 Series of GT, GTS, GTX, ULTRA or ATi's own XT, PRO, GTO, XTX, SE, uh...
There are already a lot of different reviews of the cards. Generally misconstrued reviews consisting of extreme hardware setups running extreme games at extreme settings far, far, far away from me and a helluva lot of other people. I've got a 19" monitor with a max resolution of 1280x1024, and every piece of hardware in my rig has one thing in common: it was fairly cheap.
As a gamer I often see the Nvidia logo in games "Nvidia - the way it's meant to be played", but what does that mean? Does it mean that the game has been optimised for Nvidia? Does it favor Nvidia? Why should I trust a comparative result based on a game with this bias? Why should I trust a result in the first place, when it's run on the platform of a mortal enemy? Is it even reasonable to expect fair play? I don't know, but as it so happens the majority of Reviews are based upon the SAME games and synthetic benchmarks: Fear, Prey, CoD, Quake, Crysis, Call of Juarez.. and the classical 3DMark05/06.
While it's nice to see these extreme results, they mean nothing to me. I still don't know, what to expect fromthis or thatcard under normal circumstances. Furthermore, I am really unsure whether they will run at all, because all of these hardware setups include a monstrous 750W or higher PSU.
From PC-Perspective:
"The results with the HD 3870 appear to be just as impressive with an idle power usage that is nearly 50watts less than theNvidia 8800 GT system. I specify the "system" here because while the AMD cards were tested on an Intel 975X motherboard theNvidia cards were on an nForce 680i motherboard and the 680i chipset is known to use a bit more power than Intel's own."
Hm.. interesting slip up. I wonder if the HD3850 and HD3870 would perform differently if it was given the same conditions as the Nvidia brand. It happens too often that a Nvidia SLI board is used to compare ATi and Nvidia. Would the ATi cards perform positively different on an ATi-AMD system with an AMD CPU?
I'm suspicious, because my own shift from AMD64 to Intel Core 2 was only a conditional success. The Intel System doesn't outperform AMD in every way, even though the AMDwas only single core and the Intel is a dual core.
Even the old DDR memory yielded better results in SiSoft Sandra for AMD, than the supposedly faster DDR2 running at double speeds on the Intel for me.