So I'm sitting here looking at the benchmarks in the X800 Pro and X800 XT Platinum Edition preview and recalling a conversation I had with Brandon when he arrived in Toronto and attended ATI's press event. He came away with the highly erroneous impression that the X800 would be faster. Unfortunately for him, his own article proves me correct. The X800 XT isn't faster than the 6800 Ultra. In fact, ATI didn't even have the minerals to bring the real XT to the party, instead they come to the table with a Platinum Edition card. Why would you bring a ringer, unless you're scared that your regular product can't measure up to the competition?
Whatever, I'll let Brandon have his cheat card. It still gets beaten in half the benchmarks, despite having the more mature drivers in Brandon's own words. Mature drivers are all great and wonderful, on release, but this is still the pre-season, time for testing and tuning, and I don't remember anybody winning the Super Bowl in August. Plus, if we look back on NV3X, we know damn well just how much NVIDIA can squeeze out of its cards with every driver release. They went from gimp when the NV30 launched, to being neck-and-neck with ATI now with the 5950 Ultra. NV40 is a wildly different architecture, and I'm willing to bet a Tommyburger and Tommy's chili cheese fries that that NVIDIA will improve the performance of its card a lot more over the coming year than ATI can. I mean seriously, what is R420? ATI abandoned the forward-looking R400 in favor of a card meant for "today" performance, an overglorified R300 with double the pipes, one new feature (3Dc) and not even *half* as many shader instructions as the 5950 Ultra has. The cards are so similar, ATI could just stick a new name into the driver file and be as optimized as they'll ever be. So Brandon, if you want to defend technology ATI dug up in archaeological excavations from 2002, you're more than welcome. At best you'll just have another Alamo on your hands, Texan.
)