R520, worth the wait?

Lowfat

prices are always expensive when they first come out, they will drop quickly.

SFOSOK

That depends on availability

farkas

ATI's 520 is a nice baseline to lay the foundation for their 2nd gen cards based on that chip.

As for the question, "Worth the wait" it depends. If you infer that question towards a comparison vs the NVidia, definately not. The end result is this, people get a similar card, that has been on the market and available for a few months already from the competition.

As for the extra's like AVIVO and new AA or filtering features, well, look at it this way. If the competition offers it, then you need to offer it, say for example...SM3.0. It now has it, but what more does it offer than Nvidia, well AA on HDR is a + for ATI but that's about it.

If you have a feature like AVIVO, I treat it like a free bee. Nothing more. I dont shop a video card for anything else than performance and quality of rendered scenes in 3D games.

As for the rest, well, when I shop around for a video card, no matter how much I will spend, I will always ask myself, what kind of bang for buck am I getting in return, and if I see a video card for cheaper and it performs the same or faster than the faster one, then I'll pick that one any day.

ATI has a nice product, but IMHO, they came out with something like, "Hey, look at us, us too have fast cards with nice feautres, and they will be available soon !". And that's not even mentionning the price advantage of Nvidia.

As for the drivers, and having been using Nvidia (Since their 1st major OEM contract with Dell) and ATI drivers (Since 386 cpu's) for a long time, I have a few opinions.

ATI lately has been releasing drivers on a very regular interval. Nice and refreshing on that part. However, the flip side is this. Too many drivers come out ! They have 2 types of driver packages, and one of them is looking old in the tooth, and the other is too early for it's times. Nothing in the middle. CP is effective but missing the feautures of CCC. CCC is nice, but is (I am sorry but I have a strong opinion on this) bloatware. What I mean by this is, I can definately FEEL a negative performance impact on a 1GB or more system with a recent CPU. Once a game is launched and been running for 3 or 5 minutes, fine. But anything from the point of launching a game to playing seems to add a lag or something here and there. And when you try to reproduce it or define it more, it gets harder to pinpoint. Maybe not ATI's fault that .net is not quite there yet, but definately ATI's fault for using it as a platform for their "officially" supported drivers.

Nvidia, well they release drivers a bit too slow, but you know what, apart from a bug here and there, they always seem to work fine. Nothing spectacular, but it works and is as good or better than CP from ATI IMO.

Last but not least, noise. It seems that the new ATI cards are louder, a big - for me. I dont care how hot it gets, find a way to cool it effectively, without making a racket, or hearing a winding noise, and make it silent or nearly silent. Not interested to buy a video card, and then looking a a expensive HSF just to get the thing to operate the way you intended to using it.

regards