Personally, I think you guys are overdoing the micro-stuttering issue, there are plenty of people that have xfire or sli systems that don't seem to notice it or at it isn't enough to really matter. But eitherway, until the 4870x2 comes out, there's no way to know if the card will have the same amount, less, or no microstuttering as 4870 xfire. Personally I feel that the 4870x2 will outperform the gtx 280 in terms of fps, the 4850 is just too powerful from the results we've seen and the gtx 280 doesn't seem to be a big improvement over the 9800gx2 which will very likely be spanked by the 4870x2. It just matters how smooth the game play is in games that fps don't matter (as both high ends get more than you'll notice), and smoothness could be affected by many things, especially ati's drivers. Even if they eliinate the micro-stuttering to some extend you never know what could go wrong with a dual gpu setup from the driver stand point