Nvidia’s Geforce 9800 GTX+ for $229 is no match for the overall buffness of the ATI Radeon HD 4850. Not really surprising since Nvidia didn’t even believe the speed bump warranted a full numerical upgrade.

Interestingly, AnandTech pointed out how the Geforce 8800 GTS 512MB and the Geforce 8800 GT are at a disadvantage when it comes to pricing. They will need to either lower price or axe one of the cards from retail shelves.

Since Nvidia has no real answer to the AMD Radeon HD 4850, I guess we have new mid-range king.

The Geforce 8800 GT is a fine card at approximately $199 USD, but that’s months ago and we’re now looking ahead to the new “hotness”. The new AMD Radeon HD 4850 looks to be the next great card for that mid-range price point. The Tech Report has a great first look with AMD’s new card and I am impressed. It outpaces the newly priced Geforce 9800 GTX.

It’s a single slot and as much as I enjoy single slot cards, the high temperatures worry me a bit. Regardless, it looks like it’s our new mid-range king. Nvidia is trying to fight back with a overclocked and refined Geforce 9800 GTX+, but until we have numbers from that card and a competitive price: they’ve got nothing.

It’s huge. 1.4 billion transistors type of huge. There’s a lot of computing power in this video card and coming in at $650 USD, it better be the fastest video card in the world. Unfortunately, this is where it falls short; it isn’t the fastest video card in the world. It’s the fastest single GPU video card, but the Geforce 9800 GX2 which is available for cheaper still manages to outperform it. It’s a dual-GPU card and it probably will cause a few headaches with driver profiles, but the bottom line remains the same: it is still faster.

The performance increase is a little disappointing, however I’m disappointed by the pricing most of all. The GTX 280 will set you back the most at the mentioned $650 USD. The GTX 260 is cheaper at $400 USD, but it’s still outperformed by two Geforce 8800 GT video cards in SLI which can be picked for less than $400 USD.

Two reviews from two great sites for those that are interested in reading more and seeing benchmarks:
AnandTech
Tech Report

It looks like AMD and NVIDIA are gearing up for a GPU war next month. That is if rumors are to be believed.

Here’s the rumored break down for AMD:

• Radeon HD 4850 - Hard Launch on June 18th or June 16th for about $229
• Radeon HD 4870 - Soft launch on June 25th for about $349
• Radeon HD 4870 X2 - Q3 2008 for about $529 - $549

NVIDIA’s breakdown which includes the GT200 based cards (formerly known as GeForce 9900 series):

• GeForce GTX 200 - Week of June 16th
• GeForce GTX 260 - Week of June 16th
• GeForce GTX 280 - Sneak peak at Computex (June 3 - 7)

As for performance? We only have preliminaries for the AMD cards.

Lots of people are upset over this Metal Gear Online registration. Me? I’m a patient fellow. The page times out, spits out plenty of errors and bores me with its long load times, but I keep on trucking. Gameplay starts in three days and fortunately for me, I finally registered after two days of on and off trying. Konami was terribly annoying when it came to username and password creation though.

 Just check this shit out:

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If this piece of news turns out to be true, then the GeForce 9 series was severely disappointing. Where did the 9800 GT go? Oh well, I look forward to the GeForce 10K GT, though. I want an outstanding mid-range video card to replace my 7800/7900 GT with and I’m not settling with the 8800 GT despite its excellent price/performance ratio.

Please let the new video cards cost $299 or less!

The GeForce 9600 GT launched a few days ago, but what about the mid-high ranged card or the true high end card? They are coming soon. Very soon! The GeForce 9800 GT and its bigger brother, the GeForce 9800 GTX, will apparently land between end of March and April. The dual-GPU ultra high end GeForce 9800 GX2 will launch within the month, on March 11th, 2008.

I’m looking forward to the GeForce 9800 GT. It’s fitting the bill of being a second generation DirectX 10 video card; just like how the GeForce 7800 GT (my current card) was a 2nd generation DirectX 9 video card. For the right price and performance, I may actually upgrade to it when it’s released.