When we presented you with a slide saying the RV770 core sports 800 shaders and not 480 like most people believed, it was met with a certain amount of skepticism, which is very understandable as many of the larger news sites have been reporting 480 shaders, although without presenting any proof for it. We know now that the rumor of 480 shader processors was planted by AMD and that RV770 indeed has 800 shader processors. We also know that AMD is aware that the RV770 as a single core is not enough to match the GT200 core from NVIDIA. Not surprisingly, AMD is going to play its trump of price/performance, but that doesn't mean that there's no raw performance to play with.
RV670 and the Radeon HD 3800 series offered a decent price/performance ratio, but it was rather weak compared to NVIDIA's best cards. RV770 is a mainstream chip, but unlike RV670, RV770 is going to play in the upper mainstream and performance segments and is a much more worthy opponent to NVIDIA's high-end GPUs. The slide below also shows AMD comparing the performance of Radeon HD 4870 and GeForce GTX 260 measured in FLOPS;
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After NVIDIA's decision to cut prices, Radeon HD 4870 and GeForce GTX 260 will be more evenly priced. However, you will still be able to get two Radeon HD 4850 for the price of one GeForce GTX 260 and looking at the recent CrossFire results posted over at Chinese forum Chiphell, 4850 CrossFire scores better.
System:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 4.00GHz (400x10)
RAM: DDR2 1066 5-5-5-15
Graphics: HD??50 CrossFire 625/2000MHz
Click to enlarge
Same system, but single GeForce GTX 280:
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The last picture was sent to us and we've located it at a couple of places, but not the original post by VictorWang. We see no reason to doubt it though.
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Related news:
2008-10-01 ATI Radeon™ HD 4550 and ATI Radeon™ HD 4350 Graphics Cards Load Up Compelling Gaming and Multimedia Features
2008-09-29 Radeon HD 4830 - great gaming for less than $150
2008-09-29 Radeon HD 4870 1GB slaps NVIDIA on the fingers
2008-09-17 GeForce GTX 260 with 216 shaders released
2008-09-12 Radeon HD 4670 claims the sub-$100 market
AMD is going to play the price/performance card against GeForce GTX, Vantage comparison
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