Wow, I was gonna buy a 9600GT, but it seems that it will be a 4850 >_>

I'm sure you have a link for this nonsense.....

The 4850 and 4870 behave like the 3850 and 3870 counterparts. The difference is only in clock frequency (and dram type). 

It looks like ATI is going to hold the performance crown this summer, and into the near future.

Nvidia is going to market with a very large, hot processor that is apparently having terrible yields. All in all their be behind in terms of pricing and likely equal, if a little behind, in terms of performance.

At the very least ATI is going to have one hell of a lead in shader flops.

Now I hope AMD smartens up and drops the PCI-Xpress bus and switches to HT 3.0 links for the graphics card. Push Intel and Nvidia out of the high end graphics workstation market. They could offer both graphics cards (so that AMD still gets Intel card sales) but only use 1 bus for their own cpu's.

 You're thinking of the Fusion project? CPU and GPU cores on one chip? Yeah, that would be great, but AMD has forecast desktop fusion in 2010 using graphics cores from 2007 (RV670) and CPU cores from 2007 (Phenom). That will not compete. AMD's CPU division is dead.

Look, the 4850 has a TDP (thermal design power)  of 110W. If you really think a card with 160 shaders (800 stream processors) can run at those frequencies and blow less than 110W, then you are extremely naive. Also learn how marketing people calculate to state the 1.2 Teraflop performance of the R700 (hint: essentially the same way memory throughput is touted by the same people).

So once again, the 4850 has 96 shaders (or 480 stream processors if you like high numbers). 

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1174757&postcount=3251

It is aprox the same size as the g92 with 120 shaders @ 55nm.

"Taking those ChipHell numbers, HD4850 compared with HD3870, per clock:

• Call of Juarez - 187%
• Call of Duty - 230%
• Crysis - 181% "

More than twice the performance in some applications and more than twice the shader power.

Sheesh.. you never give up, do you?

With twice the number of texture units, one would suspect that the 4850 performs much better than an 3870 right from the start (and conveniently you quote games with heavy texture loads....). Add 50% more pixel/vertex-shaders (96 vs 64, also the stream processor architecture in the 4850 may have seen some improvements) and your numbers (in whichever way they were generated) become reasonable.

Has ATI always been the underdog in terms of video cards?
And is this their first chance in glory?