ATi turning point??

I just read HD 3870 X2 review and i think it is a very good card, considering it performance higher than 8800 GT sli setup in some case.....is the 9800 GX2 able to outperform this beast??

well l wouldnt call the gx2 a card because all what it is 2 8800 cards slapped together with a internal sli connector while he ati approach is a single pcb board with 2 gpu cores on it. lm gonna say maybe but we will have to wait and see. Truthfully l wouldnt buy one of these dual cards because by the time they come out they're obsolete. Look at the dual x1950pro card.....

Here we see that the ATI beats the Nvidia in 3Dmark06 but in realworld gameplay it will probably be a whole other story ,as it has been in the past
Well in my opinion I would not even buy a Game that would need SLI or Crossfire to play.........These Videocard prices are getting out of hand if you ask me.

Quote:

Heat + SLI scaling

We got some information on why the Geforce 9800 GX2 is delayed until March. There are two main reasons. The board produces a lot of heat, a lot more than the promised 250W, and this is not something that system integrators like. The retail / etail market expects that this card will run hot, but as long as it runs stable the market shouldn’t care about it. Yes, this is not the first time that we will be telling you that the Geforce 9800 GX2 is one hot card.

More importantly is the fact that Nvidia isn't happy with the performance scaling of two of these cards together. Yes, Nvidia will kill 3-Way SLI and reintroduce Quad SLI with two of these cards, but it needs to squeeze a bit more performance; otherwise it will be the Geforce 7950 GX2 performance fiasco all over again.

This was enough to push the card back a few more weeks, and currently the Radeon 3870 X2 definitely looks even more attractive at its €350 retail price.

That about all I could find about the 9800 GX 2

ATI has a winner with the HD3870x2 and you cant really deny that. Is it the best solution? no not really, but they put a lot of effort into it, and with their crossfire x drivers you can match that card with your current hd3870 and have your own triple crossfire set up, which does give you note worthy performance increases over a single hd3870x2 in several games.

Nvidias 9800GX2 is good on paper but in practice it doesnt seem to scale very well and Nvidia knows it, they dont wanna launch it until their driver team can make it worth while. As a single card it wouldnt be a bad route for people who cannot run dual 8800GT cards but the performance scaling of dual 9800gx2 appears to be behind the already less than perfect scaling of the hd3870x2.
Nvidias other problem is the expected launch price of $599+, considering ATI's reduced prices right now you can grab an hd3870x2 for as little as $409 on newegg and regular hd3870 for $180...essentially you can run triple crossfire for the price of that single 9800GX2.. So even if the 9800gx2 scales well with release drivers, it may not be enough for people to be really happy with. The hd3870x2 has been on the market longer and most of its performance issues or game artifacts have already been patched and ATI is working on more optimizations and enhancing their crossfire x drivers. So nvidia really needs to make this a solid launch if they expect the 9800gx2 to appear as a viable product.

Traditionally dual gpu cards have been filler cards. You release these when you want to have the fastest single card around in a few benchmarks, or you release these to keep your competition at bay while you ready your new architectures. Its pretty rare for a dual card to be better value than 2x single cards. Usually you end up with scaling issues as discussed, driver problems, game issues (artifacting/crashing), heat and power issues, and most important of all...pricing mark up. Typically it is much cheaper to buy 2x single cards than it is to buy 1x dual core. But as of right now, the average price of a 3870 is about $200 (cheapest being about $170) so you dont actually see a huge mark up going from 2x 3870 to a 3870x2.

So ATI is in a stronger position if you ask me, but a lot of it banks on Nvidias pricing. The key resolution for these cards will be 2560x1600. But anyone who wants one or two of these cards for anything less may as well go to the bathroom and flush their money down the toilet.