Or see what the HD4850/4870 do, from the looks of it they will be smashing Nvidia's new cards so far, but only time can tell.
do you honestly think that an R600 with 50% more shades, texture units and some extra memory bandwidth will really be able to take down an Nvidian beast with 240Sp's, 32 ROPS and 1024MB of 512-bit memory?
even with this newfound power, R700 still wont have as much texturing ability as G92 8800, let alone GTX2xx, and will still be severely lacking in pixel fillrate compared to GTX2xx
your right in saying that only time will tell, however from what weve seen of R600, G80 and G92, my bet is on nvidia staying on top.
and please nobody jump up and say how the 4870X2 will chop it, thats a really stupid argument, if you want to use a dual gpu config to compare, then so do i, and i really doubt that a 4870x2 will beat GTX280 SLi, ANYONE who thinks otherwise, please indulge me.
also ive included a very relevant quote to the dual ati gpu vs single/dual nv gpu argument:
The G92 GPU's sheer potency creates a problem for Nvidia, though, when it becomes the building block for three- and four-way multi-GPU solutions. We saw iffy scaling with these configs in much of our testing, but I don't really blame Nvidia or its technology. The truth is that today's games, displays, and CPUs aren't yet ready to take advantage of the GPU power they're offering in these ultra-exclusive high-end configurations. For the most part, we tested with quality settings about as good as they get. (I suppose we could have tested with 16X CSAA enabled or the like, but we know from experience that brings a fairly modest increase in visual fidelity along with a modest performance penalty.) In nearly every case, dual G92s proved to be more than adequate at 2560x1600. We didn't have this same problem when we tested CrossFire X. AMD's work on performance optimizations deserves to be lauded, but one of the reasons CrossFire X scales relatively well is that the RV670 GPU is a slower building block. Two G92 GPUs consistently perform as well as three or four RV670s, and they therefore run into a whole different set of scaling problems as the GPU count rises.
see i suspect this will be much the same with the next gen, ATi may continue to scale better, but that will only be because nvidias cards are considerably better to start with.
my 2 cents.
-Wolf
