Oh its very bad yes amd is using 80 and 65 while nvidia is using 90 and 80. But to make it worse stillamd is using higher speed mem and on the high end a larger bus width then nvidia and still is having issues getting solid performance over the old nvidia chip.

An d now its confirmed the ultra will be comming and we cant be sure if the amd chip can be the old chip much less the new one.

And dont forget all of this amd is using 1 lith tech betond what nvidia has used... What happens when mvidia uses 65 nm lith too?

X800XT PE + X850XT PE > GF6800Ultra
GF 7800GTX 256MB > X850XT
X1800XT > GF7800GTX 256MB
GF 7800GTX 512MB > X1800XT
X1900XTX > GF7800 512MB
GF7900GTX > X1900XTX
X1950XTX >GF7900GTX
GF8800 GTS+GTX > X1950XTX
I think thats how it went basically.

What a load of bull.

There have been several rumors of an R600 shrink/upgraded revision before the actual release to the market, right? AMD knows that a high priced + low volume chip != good for their bottom line and would rather curb the cost of this chip before they start the heavy production of this silicon.

ATI (when they were themselves) could afford to do this -- it was heavily their main business. With AMD at the helm, they have to control the cost right out of the box.

Only facts you can file awau i that by the time it maunches thegreen team cards will be that much cheaper already. There will also be that much less room before the next gen of cards...

And ill post the amazingly obvious. I realy didnt want to buy either of these gen cards because id much rather wait till the second gen after vista before I jump. I GATE buying crap right after an os intro.

This is grade A market-speak.

I don't believe a word of it. The graphics world moves entirely too quickly for them to delay longer - or at least, it did a while back before physics asked just exactly what did the world think it was doing trying to advance stuff that quickly.

My take on this is DAAMIT is penny pinching to save on big launch parties at CeBIT. Even Nvidia is doing their launch after the big show. The odd thing is if DAAMIT doesn't throw a party at their own backyard (Germany with all the Fabs and such), it seems a bit odd.

Doing one launch should save them some pennies, but of course it is saving small change instead of the bigger ticket items.

In the grand scheme of things it probably won't matter, as most people are waiting for Vista to stabilize and real DX10 titles to come out anyway.

I'm not buying either R600 or 8800, so I don't really care.

I can't believe they didn't time their launch to be consecutive with the C2D E6600 launch.

Won't this hurt sales of their top end card? I bet a lot of people would have jumped all over the GTS 320mb instead of the 640mb if it had launched last November with the rest of them.

People wanting to jump to the next AMD card may have bought the top card had it came out already. Now they may just buy a cheaper model.

It's standard technology sales procedure to milk the early adopters and then gradually bring the price down as time goes buy. That way you can make up some of your R&D costs.

I bet they won't pull this with Barcelona. They won't have the Serpr0ns launched next to their server bad ass quad core CPU.

They could be trying someting new. Waiting to have an actual inventory of cards before launching.

I hope that means new Apple hardware comes out right in time for the new batch of DX10 cards.

have the companies ever tried this before? wouldn't this just lower the initial demand for the high-end (high-margin) chips? it's nice for the average enthusiasts, of course, but what's it do for the company?

Convenient at the very least. A full spectrum launch would have been much more impressive if they'd have pulled the other products forward rather than push the already late product back. But whatever.

Bring it on is all I have to say. It had better be a KILLER midrange card. AMD needs to *beat* Nvidia rather than just match them in order to really get revenues rolling - if they just tie then people actually have a decision to make so AMD needs to supply the market with a decisive product. And availability had better be 100% after all the time they've taken.

Ohh..so lose revenue to make a complete launch. So much more rational than..any other possible issue. Wonder if this is why teh cardmakers cant show it at cebit either.

Sounds good to me, I hope this launch is successful.