Unknown Soldier said:
They dropped the ball and yet they expect people to support them. Ermm .. not today I won't.
The GTX 512MB is beating the crap outta the R520 .. why should I buy the R520?
They expect people to support them? They fully know how damaging this delay is. They're trying to sell a product just like NVidia.
Beating the crap outta R520? WTF are you talking about?
Digit-life: Ignoring Riddick (but D3 still included), only 10% faster on average through 6 tests.
Anandtech: Ignoring B&W2 (bug?), 15% faster through 6 tests.
Tech-report: 13%, 7 tests (and they omitted Farcry and Splinter cell, which they usually test)
(All numbers for 1600x1200 w/ AA/AF, because you'd be a moron for not enabling them with these cards)
None of these include the >30% performance fix for FEAR either.
The X1800XT costs less, too, and performs right alongside NVidia's Uber edition in the newest games. It uses less power, and
really blows the crap out of the 512MB GTX when dynamic branching is used (I mean 50-100%, not a piddly 10%). Crytek have
shown this, so has Epic with Unreal Engine 3 (I think), and ATI in their SDK. Carmack is also on this path, especially with XB360 being his primary development platform. R520 also has high quality AF, does 6xAA with transparency antialiasing waaaay faster than 8xS (looks better too), and can do HDR and MSAA together.
No, not everybody knows these reasons, but saying "why should I buy the R520?" is stupid, especially as a senior member of B3D. There are tons of reasons, and if I was buying a card now R520 is the clear winner to me, just like last gen I'd get NV40 even though R480 was faster overall.
Yes ATI dropped the ball, but the card is here now, so why are you still bitching? To me the biggest blunders are the D3/Q4 OpenGL screw-up and the FEAR problem (and who knows what else), which really took the oomph out of their launch.
EDIT: Forgot to mention a big R520 feature: HDR+MSAA