At 1920x1200, the 4870 actually manages to outrun both the GTX 260 and 280!

The Tech Report posted an article on AMD's Radeon HD 4870 graphics processor. Here's an excerpt:

The RV770 GPU looks to be an unequivocal success on almost every front. In its most affordable form, the Radeon HD 4850 delivers higher performance overall than the GeForce 9800 GTX and redefines GPU value at the ever-popular $199 price point. Meanwhile, the RV770's most potent form is even more impressive, in my view. Onboard the Radeon HD 4870, this GPU sets a new standard for architectural efficiency—in terms of performance per die area—due to two things: a broad-reaching rearchitecting and optimization the of R600 graphics core and the astounding amount of bandwidth GDDR5 memory can transfer over a 256-bit interface. Both of these things seem to work every bit as well as advertised. In practical terms, what all of this means is that the Radeon HD 4870, a $299 product, competes closely with the GeForce GTX 260, a $399 card based on a chip twice the size.

I have to take issue with a couple of arguments I hear coming from both sides of the GPU power struggle, though. AMD decided a while back, after the R600 debacle, to stop building high-end GPUs as a cost-cutting measure and instead address the high end with multi-GPU solutions. They have since started talking about how the era of the large, "monolithic" GPU is over. I think that's hogwash. In fact, I'd love to see a RV770-derived behemoth with 1600 SPs and 80 texture units on the horizon. Can you imagine? Big chips don't suffer from the quirks of multi-GPU implementations, which never seem to have profiles for newly released games just as you'd want to be playing them, and building a big chip doesn't necessarily preclude a company from building a mid-sized one. Yes, Nvidia still makes high-end GPUs like the GeForce GTX 280, but they also make mid-range chips, too.

One example of such a chip is the 55nm variant of the G92 that powers the GeForce 9800 GTX+. If Nvidia can deliver those as expected by mid-July and cut another 30 bucks off of the projects list price, they'll have a very effective counter to the Radeon HD 4850, nearly equivalent in size, performance, and power consumption.

At the same time, Nvidia is trying to press its advantage on the GPU-compute front by investing loads of marketing time and effort into its CUDA platform, with particular emphasis on the potential value of its GPU-accelerated PhysX API to gamers. I can see the vision there, but look: hardware-accelerated physics has been just around the corner for longer than I care to remember, but it's never really happened. Perhaps Nvidia will succeed where Ageia alone didn't, but I wouldn't base my GPU buying decision on it. If PhysX-based games really do arrive someday, I doubt they'll make much of an impact during the lifespan of one of today's graphics cards.

I was hoping the idle power use would be lower. Looks like that's the 4800 series only weakness. Now that they figured out how to beat Nvidia on performance, hopefully they'll go in and start optimizing the power usage and the crossfire issues.