So, let me get this right....... the 5870 is priced around the GTX285 price point which would suggest that it will be no more than around 5% faster at best, if it was more, they would charge more, even ATi like to make a little money outta their hardware, I kind of find this a little dissapointing as this is a generation on from the G200 series, kind of suggests that the 5870 x2 will only be marginally faster than the 295 (possibly 10%), makes you wonder what all the hype is really, ATi had better have something up their sleeve when the G300 whateveritscalled is released later on by NVidia otherwise the Green side are going to be charging a mint for "the worlds fastest single and multi GPU's", kind of sucks really :shadedshu
Come on as if, why would they bother? Considering an overclocked 4890 can end up 5% faster than a GTX285, where's the logic in creating a new chip that's a few percent faster than their previous highend chip?
What they mean is that it will be their card closest in price to the GTX285.
They did the same with the 4800s. They said they were to compete with G92 GPUs yet they were much faster, they only reason they were deemed G92 competition was due to their pricings.
They know better than to sell their latest cards at expensive prices. It's nVidia that doesn't understand the process of lowering the price and selling bucketloads.
4800s outsold GT200 based cards by a huge amount for this very reason, even though they're similar in performance.
ATi's high end was priced the same as nVidia's middle end, yet offered nVidia highend performance. Of course they're going to sell far more.
Add on to that the low cost of manufacture and there's no reason for them to 'overprice' their cards the way nVidia do.
They know it's not about 'Let's put the highest price possible on these cards'. They will definitely sell more and make far more money if more people buy them at a lower price.
It's so simple, I don't get why people assume they're gonna charge crazy prices for their cards. ATi has ended the day of silly priced cards, nVidia have to go cheaper to compete and this is where ATi are destroying nVidia.