Quote Originally Posted by AliG View Post
basically anything that uses the valve engine (which I belive BF2 does since its a steam game) runs extremely nicely with ati cards, which will also help them out.


But the way I see it, gt 200 is designed if anything to scare intel, which I bet it will until larabee comes out and even still larabee won't be able to compete with ati and nvidia's high end no matter how big intel's R&D fund is. The first generation is always generally a test to see how well certain aspects work, in the case of g80 and core 2, both performed above and beyond expectations, while the r600 and k10 while very modular, did not perform up to their expectations. I wouldn't be surprised to see a second/third generation larabee that can out perform the gtx 280 though.

So in short, gtx 280 will spank the rv770, but the rv770 was never meant to compete with it anyways. What'll be key is how well the MCM design works out for the r700 and how well the card scales (hopefully they won't need that bridge chip anymore as that definitely added costs and heat to the 3870x2)

No the BF2 engine is designed and programmed by the "engineers" at DICE IIRC. The engine features ugly looking bump maps and large environments. On the contrary, the Valve source enigine features nice looking bump/normal maps but tiny, tiny little low-poly environments

I wonder how larrabee will fare against nvidias/atis offerings at the time of release!