Headlines - Force3D jumps the gun, launches its Radeon HD 4870

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What do you do if you're a new start up in the graphics card market seeking a bit of attention? Launch your Radeon HD 4870 a day before the rest, of course.

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Read more.

the theoretical memory speed instantaneously makes GDDR3 feels like ancient dinosours..

imagine a 512bit bus with this GDDR5 RAM... holy crap..

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Originally Posted by sawyen

the theoretical memory speed instantaneously makes GDDR3 feels like ancient dinosours..

imagine a 512bit bus with this GDDR5 RAM... holy crap..

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GT300? ;)

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Originally Posted by hexus

Eagle-eyed readers might be wondering if Force3D is any relation to Inno3D. Both companies happen to be registered at the same address, but Force3D is telling us there's no relation.

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Of course there isn't - if you sign an exclusive distribution contract you honour it ;)

just noticed an error :P

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So, what will Force3D's version of the highly-anticipated HD 3870 have in store?

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Just so you know. will be reading article now and will update with a response :)

edit: wow nice numbers i think :P, beats a x2 and so its definitly on line with a 9800x2, perhaps even the gtx280 then as they are similar afaik in performance.

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Originally Posted by Hicks12

just noticed an error :P



Just so you know. will be reading article now and will update with a response :)

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Fixed

This is the card I have been waiting for to replace my 8800GT for some nice 1920 x 1200 gaming, seen some benchies that look promising, tomorrow will tell, lets hope Scan get some in :D

About 20% faster than the 4850 based on the graphs. Decent (I am keeping in mind that it's expected to cost 50% more), let's see some game benchmarks.

Depending on how long you can wait the cards will probably end up similar in cost to the HD3000 equivilents, IE the 4850 at £110-115, and the 4870 down to £150ish. The reason its high is, like with gddr2, 3 and now 5, ddr2/3 and beyond gddr5 is brand new, initial batches would have been expensive for(you assume samsung or hynix) to produce. Considering these will clearly outsell the bejesus out of Nvidia's cards and OEM's will sign up to buy them(and probably spider platform's from AMD for easily best price/performance systems around) by the buttload too that AMD's next order from those companies for memory will be massively larger, kicking both companies into making much larger quantities dropping the price very very quickly.

Theres never a price difference in cores, so the price difference, other than premium for performance is in the memory. Give it 2 months, maybe 3 and it will be a £150 card. Nvidia even down at 55nm in several months have zero chance of competing with those costs. gddr5 will do nothing for them, they have an abundance of bandwidth already, gddr5 would increase cost for unused bandwidth. The 512mb bus is simply to large, takes too many pins, increases size of core and decreases yield, increases pcb layer number, traces and cost of the pcb and power circuitry to compensate for signal interference. Nvidia lost this round already, a card that loses as many benchmarks as it wins, despite the TWIMTBP program(which in reality, means the ATi card is superb, massive faster and more efficient than Nvidia's) and costs twice as much. This time they shouldn't waste time switching to lower core size, they should get on with the next core.

Excellent post, and I'm in complete agreement with everything you've said.

Considering how little ATI have done, they've pulled off an absolute corker. NV have tried the same, but it's only ended up bloated and stretched, a bit like the P4 Prescott - same as the Northwood, just fatter. ATI's just tweaked what they had and corrected what was wrong with it. Towards the end of this core cycle NV may start to close the gap some more if a lot of games start basing themselves on the UT3 engine (thanks to that PhysX thingy), but with ATI standing shoulder to shoulder with Intel in holding hands with Havok, any advantage could well be short lived.

NVIDIA are in that zone between the rock and the hard place at the moment. Unless they can pull of some major deals quickly, they're going to have to come up with some extra special to carry on their long-term success. All they have at the moment are blind alleys.

I think it will depend on demand as well. The 8800GT was marked up heavily at the beginning when people realised that it provided excellent bang for bucks. The 4850 looks like the new 8800GT, and I can't help but wonder if prices will increase tomorrow/after tomorrow depending on how the 4870 fares. Then again, it depends what sort of premium people are willing to pay for extra performance. For instance, assuming a 20% performance increase and a 50% price increase would a large number of enthusiasts still go for the 4870? If it's fairly divided, then I can see the cheapest 4850 staying at £123. On the other hand, if most people think that the 4870 is very good value, but that they want to stick with the best value they can get, and go for the 4850, I can see the 4850 rise to £135-ish (some of them are already there, but I am referring to the cheapest), at least in the near term. Basically, I think there is a chance that price will go up before it goes down. And how soon it goes down will also depend on the 9800GTX+.

It won't, ATi have a card, the low end competes with the 260 fine and the high end, actually edges out the 280gtx possibly, they could well have priced them way up, at £200/300 respectively, or £300/400, but they didn't Ati before the 2900xt release said their gameplan was to move the "high end" segment from the £100-200 bracket basically, they don't want to sell 500k £400 cards, they want to sell 10million £150 cards. The dual core card was I guess the extreme segment, which previously would have been £400-500. Ati could easily, and completely knew the costs and performance of both sets of cards and released with a low RRP, they have no yield issues(unlike others) and shortages + price hikes won't happen as long as, well lets be honest, people don't buy from OCUk when they do it, and they WILL do it.


The physx thing is completely and utterly useless aswell, Nvidia want it to die, its crap technology offering entirely nothing. THe special ut3 levels weren't pretty or good because of Physx, they were good because people spent an ungodly amount of time designing every last breakable wall, thats where the trouble is, and thats why the whole game wasn't the same, because design time right now without a decent engine that can do it all automatically(we are a long way off) is so high that games can only have 1 "special" level. If all levels were the same level of detail it would simply not come out for an extra 2 years.

Not to mention, in this generation, considering the lack of Physx games you'd be looking at wanting the 2nd card mostly for SLi, and secondaryily for Physx, who wants to buy 2x280 GTX's to just sometimes use a couple of levels that use Physx......answer, fanboys, and even they will be detered this generation looking at double the cost for performance as ATi.

Also remember, ATi, and Intel(who only support ATi crossfire and not sli) BOTH support Havoc, and when multi cores with intergrated gpu cores come out in the next couple of years from both companies, meaning every system bought on the entire market supports Havoc, what dev in their right mind will design games for Physx? I can answer, the ones that Nvidia pay enough to do it, but even with a large offer, supporting Physx with next to no users, or supporting Havoc which everyone will have availble to them......... even large wads of cash will not persuade many of them.

With Physx in the market and games supporting "physx" on the box, same way Crysis "optimised for quad core", its just another marketing gimmick but one that you look bad if you don't support. Rather than spending, millions, every year, for the foreseeable future competing with Physx with their own APi, which in the space of a decade will cost them a hell of a lot in R&D and advertising/paying companies to use it, they just bought up Physx, put some loose support behind it, let it die but still save lots in the long run. Cheaper to spend 50mil on a companie and let the idea die(because it was useless and a gimmick) than spend 500mil in 20 years competing, they jumped the gun, infact probably caused AMD to go Havoc and Intel to let them, as Nvidia keep irritating Intel. By making the move, they made it easy for INtel/AMD to gang up on them.

We'll see. I rather see price go down than up, but let's not forget that the 8800GT the numerous e-tailers (not only OcUK but also Scan, Play, Ebuyer, Amazon, Newegg and pretty much every stores that originally had the card around RRP) hiked up price by £20 or more due to shortage of supply (and many people were willing to pay the extra cost). What I am saying this, the 4850 is a hot card from a bang per buck perspective, so unless AMD is better at supplying the market than nVidia were, shortage will inevitably lead to retailer mark up. Suppose if demand is indeed 10 million, can they produce that much in the near term? Wait long enough, and price will eventually go down, that's a given. But I am interested to see where the price will be next week.

One thing that ATI needs to sort out is their equivalent of CUDA - it could be a bit of a trump card for Nvidia.

Heheh, crossfire anyone?

Havok will be ahead of PhysX for a long time, it's got a damn big lead over it for a start - just about every game on the market uses the Havok engine for dedicated physics.

Nvidia will no doubt come back in time, but it's good to see AMD coming out pretty much on top again. It's nice to see that AMD are keeping with reasonably simple product lines, rather than adding on +, GT, GTX, GTS, etc. Don't get me wrong, i love my 8800GT, but the number of models Nvidia bring out each revision is just ridiculous.

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Originally Posted by Fraz

One thing that ATI needs to sort out is their equivalent of CUDA - it could be a bit of a trump card for Nvidia.

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Same could be said for DirectX 10.1 support on the ATI cards. Both are fairly useless right now. Only UT3 supports CUDA PhysX and Assassins Creed supports DirectX10.1 (without the latest patch)? Either way I don't think we can lose with these prices whatever we choose. :)