Hey sup people. AMD and nVidia are going to release some of their new models soon, and I found them to be worthy of their own thread.
First, the high-range:
Radeon HD3870 X2
With a whoping gigabyte of RAM at 115GB/s and, for those who love FLOPS, over 1 TERAFLOP of processing power, AMD finally gives some competition to the GeForce 8800 Ultra. This one is a dual card if you are wondering, sporting two RV670 cores in Crossfire mode. Full specs of the card here.
Core Clock: 800 MHz
Shader Clock: 800 MHz
Memory Clock 1800 Mhz
Memory Bandwidth: 115.2 GB/sec
FLOPS:1024 GFLOPS
Pixel Fill Rate: 25600 MPixels/sec
Texture Fill Rate: 25600 MTexels/sec
Framebuffer: 1024 MB
Memory Type: GDDR3
Memory Bus Type: 256 bit
DirectX Compliance: 10.1
OpenGL Compliance: 2.0
PS/VS Version: 4.1/4.1
Process: 55 nm
Shader Processors: 640
Texture Units: 32
Raster Operators 32
As you can see, it's a very hefty card. All of it's specs are higher than the 8800 Ultra's... but the problem is, this is a Crossfire card. Dual AMD mode is not very well implemented on games, so the difference can't be seen right away now. In the games that it's well implemented, the difference is noticeable (especially at higher res)... but in the ones which is not, the difference is negative towards the single Radeon HD3870. That's a driver issue, so we'll have to wait to see the actual benefit. One thing to consider: this card is supposed to be on the high $400 mark. So it's not that bad with proper drivers, eh? (The 9800GX2 is 30% faster than the Ultra)
Now mid-range:
GeForce 9600 GT
This card is supposed to replace the 8600GT. This has a 512MB at 256 bit RAM (finally on a midrange card) of GDDR3, with a G94 core featuring 64 shader processor. Some tests on chinese site PCOnline (warning, loosy translation) show that this card is a worthy succesor of the 8600GT, doubling it's performance and right away putting it on the 8800GT's territory. For the under $200 range, that's not too shabby.
Now the low end.
Radeon HD 3450, HD 3470 and HD 3650.
You won't probably care much about these, maybe except the 3650. This one uses a shrinked Radeon HD2600 die, sharing most of its specs. It delivers a 2600XT-like performance for $99... not that the 2600 was that great anyway.
Discuss.
