with a title like that, i'd be surprised there are no fanboy talk! so, let me start: nVidia is Cheesecake, AMD teh sukcs /random
You go on about price / performance yet you bought one of the most expensive HD5850's that was available.... I don't care if the over priced Toxic edition is still £200, HD5850's has been available for under £150 for quite a while (The MSI Twin Frozr II was under £130 for a while....). At this price it is an excellent alternative to the ~£140 GTX460.
NVIDIA didn't take their time to release a proper DX11 card. NVIDIA simply screwed up in Q4/2009 and weren't able to release their highend in Q4/2009, nor in Q1/2010, but only in Q2/2010. And then at the end of Q2/2010, start of Q3/2010 they released GTX460. I wonder how people come up with statements like "nvidia took their time to release a proper dx11 card", when the only reason they come later was that they screwed it up at design phase. And again, define "proper dx11 card". Is proper dx11 card the one which scores higher score in Heaven benchmark ? Because there is no major real world use for the extra tesselation performance of nvidia cards. "DX11 done right" is just a marketing slogan and can be proved wrong when the real DX11 games will come. The current DX11 games are just games with DX11 slapped on top, so they can say "look, DX11 game".
ok i define a proper dx11 card, for example, dx9 it is at 100% performance, dx10 it is at 90%, dx11 it is at 80% performance. With 5850 it goes: 100,90, 20. And i like dx11 simple as.
When it comes to cards I go with best bang for the buck, I don't care if it is Nvidia or AMD. Having said that, if two cards are similar in quality and similar in price I will always opt Nvidia because they tend to be better supported in games. While I have no brand loyalty I pretty much always go with Nvidia based on getting a great gaming performance. I had an AMD 5850 which was a great card (at the time Nvidia had nothing on AMD and I had no issue going where the best deal was), but I felt it never performed as well as it should - Nvidia support a lot of games so always have a headstart with drivers, I always feel with AMD I am playing catch up. I sold my 5850 and replaced it with a GTX 560. When giving people advice I will always recommend Nvidia and the equivalent AMD card because the AMD cards are undeniabl good, it is simply my personal bias that leans me towards Nvidia in general
And how and in what you come up with those numbers ? Once again, Unigine Heaven Benchmark is not relevant, we play games, not benchmarks.
In the context of my reply why not? I was replying to a post that showed the price as £190 whereas it can easily be found for <£155. Whether a card is EOL or not is irrelevant when it has better price vs performance than the card we are comparing it to (GTX460) and is still available to purchase.
Nvidia is indeed cheesecake! I'm nomming on my GTX 560 cheesecake - it has the flavour of a 570 but half the fat!
If anyone believes this nonsense I will never sell my 5850 in the marketplace. Mods, delete this drivel !
I think that poorly worded reply was aimed at you and the OP. And no even if you can find it at 155 its not great value as the 6870 can be found for 160.
What pooly worded reply? The person who I was replying to IS the OP... I agree with you on the HD6870, it is a great value card and sits in a perfect value spot between the GTX460 and GTX560. My comments on the HD5850 were only to correct the OP on the price and the fact that compared to a GTX460 @ £140, the HD5850 @ £150 is still great value. Quite frankly with the GTX460 @ £140, HD5850 @ £150 and HD6870 @ £160 you would be hard pressed to go wrong with any of these purchases. All blend a good combination of performance and power consumption / noise levels.
The last ATi card I had was a 9800Pro. That was an awesome, awesome card. When it died, my word, tears were shed. Nothing from ATi since has really struck a chord with me since then tbh.
I've found the 200 series drivers from NVIDIA to be very unreliable. I'm stuck with 192 drivers as these offer me far better image quality & performance. What's happened to NVIDIA Drivers? I hear the ATI Drivers have become very successful and this is a biggy for me plus the ATI cards tend to be cheaper and offer on par and sometimes better performance from that of the NVIDIA equivalent. So with this in mid, this is why i've now changed to ATI.
I recently thought I had an AMD driver issue when I updated ...all of a sudden online Final Score on a saturday afternoon didn't work. ALL the other BBC video output worked iPlayer, News24 etc just not this. Problem was solved with latest Adobe updates to Flash. Moral: people are too quick to blame drivers, especially AMD drivers, when they have a problem.
