5870 unleashed

that thing is on the market a while now.
used for ray tracing, and other professional applications.
performence wise its not so amazing anymore.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/product..._c1060_us.html
less then 1 Tflop single precision and just 78Mflop double precision.
ati and nvidia cards that cost 200 euro's are faster.
but drivers are designed to help with raytracing, GPGPU, and more

its a bit like firegl/quadro VGA cards, performence wise there not super, there extremely pricey, up to 5000 euro's for a card.
but the drivers are designed for CAD drawings and stuff, and support is a lot better.
and if you use a normal ati/nvidia card for cad, even if its performence wise a better card, firegl/quadro cards are better for cad drawings.
but useless for gaming.

there was a company that made a PC with 4 times a 9800*2 VGA card, and used cuda to control the cards.
the 4000 euro PC they made performed faster than a 512 CPU render cluster.
but only for certain applications, as you need to rewrite your application with cuda, else it wont use your VGA cards

and that is the idea of GPGPU, use your GPU to do more tasks, thats why native C++ support from nvidia a,d openCL from nvidia/ati is so interesting.
raw performence of a GPU is a lot more than hat of a CPU, we just need to use it

Just for the sake of avoiding confusion..... shouldn't those "57s" be 48s"???

For his argument they aren't, but they could be.

The 4870,5770, and gtx260 are all sitting in that 149-169$ price bracket, with the 5770 sitting in the low end performance wise, gtx260 middle, and the 4870 usually on top, and the differences from bottom to top between the three cards in most games @1920x1200 is 5-10fps.

The good going for those 5770's is dx11 and less noise/heat/power consumption, the first probably won't matter as when fully built dx11 games are out the card will be useless.

Right now in that price bracket with mail in rebates you can get a 4890 for 169$ which beats all of the above though...

My opinion is that the 5770 is a bit overpriced to let the 4870 and 4890 stock move, while charging a bit of premium for lower power requirement (for ppl that have oem PSU changing to a 5770 is a lot easier than for a 4870/GTX260)/lower heat/DX11. Then it depends on how the gaming world evolves (if more reliant on Tessellation, making bandwidth less important), making the 5770 a bit closer or even surpassing the 4870 performance on DX11 games (although it might/will take some time for us too see DX11 games in significant quantities).

But the problem of the GTX 260 is that 4870 is generally a better choice (unless you want to do [email protected]) and then as being said, the 4890 is quite close to the performance of the GTX285 in gaming these days - look for example at the tests on this 5850 review http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3650 , showing the 4980 quite close to the GTX 285 performance.