Gorguls you sure did pick the worst slides for 4850 to show here lol .
Anyhow,the conclusion tells it all:
This battle is a neck-and-neck race. In games like Quake Wars, F.E.A.R., and Call of Duty 4, our testing gave the edge to the 4850. But in Lost Planet DX10 and BioShock DX10 the GeForce 9800 GTX ran faster than the 4850 (in Company of Heroes, the 4850 and 9800 GTX traded wins). Meanwhile Crysis, HL2 Episode Two, and Oblivion were too close to call. Depending on which games you play (and perhaps certain levels in the same game) the edge could go to AMD or NVIDIA in our preliminary testing.
So we have a situation where factory OCed 9800GTX+ and a stock clocked Radeon 4850 are in neck-to-neck race.
Now somebody tell me,who's gonna stop AMD's partners like ASUS to do the HD4850TOP OC version and blow this 9800GTX+ out of the water?All they gotta do is raise the core clock and memory clock 5-10% and they are done.