basically, lol, take it as truth, or just PR, up to you, but either way it's very funny :)

Pretty funny how they have taken a statement made as a semi-serious, but mostly joking play on fanboyism, and turned it into gospel truth. Are they that desperate to make their products sell? I guess they are feeling the heat from being the last bastion of nVidia-only AIBs.

lol someone feels theatened :P "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." actually ATi didnt abandon the r400 but relablede it R500 because it could use more development.

that's not refuting his point though, they still canned what it was meant to be for this product run in order to serve up the same old tech but a little bit faster for half a ton of your hard earned ££ for another six months minimum..

I would say 'a little bit faster' is a slight understatement, wouldn't you? I agree that it's disappointing not to see SM 3.0 on ATi's new products, but there is the question of how useful it is going to be in this coming year or two.

"the weird turn pro." -HST This is getting fun FAST! 8-)

I know that 3Dc isn't part of the DirectX spec now SirEric has corrected himself - Way to twist my old posts. I'll agree that the performance delta between the 6800 and X800 is pretty small in general, but there seems to be a fair amount of evidence that ATi still has the faster shader implementation. Whether this will be borne out in upcoming titles is another matter but it seems sensible to guestimate that it will be. And considering 3.0 shaders are, to a large extent, all about improving performance (and again, we are yet to see how the 6800 will handle 3.0 shader code), surely it is just largely two different means to the same end? And as for the bias comment, all I can say is... glass houses, throwing stones.

Just some stuff I would like to agree with: Half-Life 2 = Defenitly not a graphical wonder, its look like a game from 2002 or 2003... It made lots of fuzz about broken PS2.0, but thats in the past now. Tomb Raider = Whomever brings a console port to a discussion about hardcore PC graphics should be shot. Doom 3 = Will be the benchmark of the future.