Opinions - AMD vs. NVIDIA - who really won in HD 6850 and GTX 460 battle

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The dust has settled. I take a look back at last week's GPU shenanigans.

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Read more.

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards....=636&card2=632

Nice article Tarinder, especially the note about needing a raison d'etre.

There's been a lot of fallout over it, what with Anandtech caving in and the rather heated discussion afterwards. Then before that was the HAWX 2 demo nonsense.

Nvidia is barely hanging on by using every underhand tactic in the book, it will be interesting to see if AMD decide to lean on reviewers just as hard with Nvidia's next release.

total rubbish Jimbo - the GTX460 is a great mid range card ` barely hanging on` , want to shout that louder in RED text....

great editorial Tarinder - same as a great review - rebenching with the latest drivers to bring a subjective review is another reason to come here

Will be interesting to see what happens with future drivers, the 460 must be near the edge while the 6850/6870 are still in driver infancy as such.

Great read!
Whilst its very true Nvidia want to squash AMD in whatever way they can, Im not sure i agree that AMD want to see NVidia in the dustbin. Reasoning behind this opinion is Nvidia will work on games with all their proprietary techniques/technology and then actively block out AMD, trying create a pocket of trusted users who get fixed into the Nvidia way (much like apple). AMD on the otherhand tend to develop with openness in mind, allowing the user to do things their way and even allowing Nvidia to join in and make the whole world a much easier place (if only eh!).

I recently built a machine for a mate with an overclocked 1GB GTX460 and man was it a nice card; Quiet, cool, small and decent amount of grunt. Before that was released i would have said AMD every time, Nvidia briefly managed to pull it back in my estimates due to the attractive price per performance of the 460 but purely because the new Radeons are comparable i will be saying AMD AMD AMD once again!

Techpowerup and another site received a 1120 shader version of the 6850 for review. That imo is a bit underhand.

If they incorporate the ability to unlock shaders as the Phenom II had teh ability to unlock cores they could be onto a winner. Unless of course people are bricking cards and then end up buying a 460 as they don't have any warranty left!

To me, AMD took it to Nvidia this time and definitely won. Lets look at it from a price point - first of the cream "1024mb" cards from Nvidia are over £150 at major retailers whilst from launch the AMD is clearly cheaper varying between £135-150. With that in mind and the fact that the AMD has less power requirements (needing only 6-pin molex) whilst more or less keeping up with the GTX 460 and even trouncing it at some games.

Once the stock starts to settle, the 6850 price will undoubtedly drop further and I expect it to be cheaper by atleast £15-20. Do I really want 1-5 frames of performance for £20? Not really.

AMD for me this time. I was actually going to purchase the Gigabyte GTX460 OC however fate or rather AMD came out with the 6850 last week.

wizard - some would say AMD were `underhanded` by having a small amount of sub £135 6850`s on launch , then when these ran out , they all went to £150 , and moure - tis hard to find a 6850 in stock for under £160 , or a 6870 for under £200;


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in fact looking on scan , inc shipping the cheapest 6850 is £163 , and the cheapest 6870 is £198 , neither are in stock - the only in stock card , delivered would be £210 for a 6870.

higher demand + diminishing stock = higher prices... its the way its always been and if Nvidia cards stock was running out then you would probably see the same thing happen. Once the cards have been around for a month or so and everything settles is when you really see how the competition lies.

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Originally Posted by HalloweenJack

total rubbish Jimbo - the GTX460 is a great mid range card ` barely hanging on` , want to shout that louder in RED text....

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Nvidia has one decent card capable of matching the 6800's. Do do that requires a 50% bigger chip and overclock it to various levels.

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Originally Posted by HalloweenJack

wizard - some would say AMD were `underhanded` by having a small amount of sub £135 6850`s on launch , then when these ran out , they all went to £150 , and moure - tis hard to find a 6850 in stock for under £160 , or a 6870 for under £200;


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in fact looking on scan , inc shipping the cheapest 6850 is £163 , and the cheapest 6870 is £198 , neither are in stock - the only in stock card , delivered would be £210 for a 6870.

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Let's talk about Fermi's non availability for a month after "release", or the gtx 295 and 275 which had the worst availability of any cards ever. Short memory much halloweenjack?

The difference there was truly tiny release numbers, less than 10000 each. AMD had over 200k 6850/6870 cards this week and they all sold out in a day.

[static]

Yeah but: PhysX, CUDA, 3D Vision, Linux support, Tessellation.

Rollo, out. [static]

Im surprised noone mentioned GTX470. Now i know the new prices have not taken effect in most of the countries but if the prices that are in Holland now get widespread then we have a winner. I have seen GTX470 for 166 euros there. Shame they ship it only to belgium and holland. Meh

Problem with the 470 is it's practically EOL, which is one reason why Nvidia were so keen to push the highly overclocked EVGA 460 against the 6870 instead.