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Alot of them around, seriously

Do you find that UT3 makes you a little dizzy after playing it for a while? Running around 90MPH is fun in the open maps but when you are inside places it makes me want to hork.

Yep, that is the bottom line. It isn't even an upgrade...is is a parallel transition to a different brand. So what...maybe there is a 10 FPS difference here or there but when you are talking about 110 vs 120 FPS at your gaming rez....there isn't a point. I think if the reverse scenario was at hand....like you have a 4870 and want to get an EVGA 260 for the step up program then that is a different story and might be worth it if you plan on getting the next NV card.

No problems here.

lol ovaltine, that's what i said, stop stealing my thoughts, I need them back in my head...

You should be happy with your GTX 260, and you waited and got it for $300, even though I suspect some 260's will drop below that with rebates, or even without, if they haven't already.

The performane difference between the 260 and 4870 isn't enough to worry about. And although the 260 gives slightly lower fps, of course people never seem to bother mentioning the other upsides of the 260 other than just fps benchmarks. One of which being memory.
If you are running even semi high resolutions and like to load up on AA and AF, the 260 does have the 900mb of trusty ddr3 vid ram, which I feel does make you more futureproof.

I know, the 4870 has ddr5, larger bandwidth. However, there comes a point where that stuff just doesn't matter, but the quantity of memory does. If the 260 only had like 200mb or so more memory, then I might say that (memory wise) it would draw pretty even with the 4870's ddr5. But we are talking nearly 400mb more memory here. And lets not forget that ddr3 still does a great job and that the 2xx cards still have memory bandwidths that are nothing to laugh at, to say the least. It is just fine.

Also, what ever happened to the old rule of thumb "more memory is better than faster memory"? That still holds true in this case, just because the 2xx cards have so much more ram (2x more and almost 2x more).
Granted, at this moment a lot of people are probably content with 512mb ram, for now.
But as mentioned above, people are always upgrading to bigger and better monitors, which need more ram. And lets not forget that we have games out at this moment that recommend 512mb of ram. I know 512mb of ddr5 will lift you beyond that recommendation, but what happens in the coming months when you start seeing 640mb and 768mb recommended?

Also, since 640mb/768mb cards have been out for so long now, then consider Nv's best now have 900mb and 1gb, game devs are clearly looking for ways to utilize all that vid ram people have, and have had for a while.
Even the 8800 GTS, which is now basically a budget card, has had 640mb of ram and was released nearly 2 years ago, then the Ultra with 768mb following right behind.

Of course the 260/280 has Cuda and we'll have to see what comes of that, but it sure can't hurt to have it. Anyhow, you really need to look at the OC'ing front as well. I think it is pretty widely accepted that the 2xx cards OC better in general than ati's offerings. I can only personally speak for the 2xx line, and my GTX 280, bought for $460, already has factory OC's of 650mhz core and 2300mhz memory.

So far, my manual OC, on top of the factory OC, is sitting right now at 11% increase for both core & ram and I'm still not done bumping up yet.
Take that 11% of my own OC combined with the factory OC and I roughly have about a 18% OC from vanilla 280 specs (might be more, not good at math off the dome!). And I have nothing more than a mid range case with average cooling at best.
I know a couple people with the 4870 and both have apparently maxed their OC's at about 9%.

So, it does seem the 2xx cards OC better, regardless of whether or not my numbers accurately reflect those of a larger sampling. And in the case of the 260, if it can reach just a 14% or 15% OC vs a 9% OC on the 4870, then that should pretty much take care of the whole "the 260 is slower" thing as the difference would be even more minimal.
I've heard numerous reports of people pushing their 260's to perform on par or better than a vanilla 280 without much problem.

After that, throw in the fact that the 260 does have much more vid ram (should you need it, and should you believe like many of us do that 400mb more ram is or will be better than 512 of faster ram), then does the 4870 really have a notable edge over the 260 for the same price?
Also, I do feel that the 2xx cards just have a bit more quality to them, like they can take more of a beating and keep on ticking. Pretty solid builds. If you also believe that (or not) then there is another reason to sway you one way or another.

Lastly (didn't want the post to get this long but want to mention this), I want to talk about heat and noise.
As mentioned, my GTX 280 is coming up on a 20% OC. Yet, even with auto fan speed, my temps during Crysis sessions never went above 80c. Only time I've seen it higher is when torturing it with FUR. And people say that the fan speed is a bit louder than ati's. However, with my fan on auto, it doesn't get loud at all. And since I don't heat up past 80c, the auto fan speed hasn't needed to come close to going 100%. Granted when I tried 100% manual fan speed it was pretty loud, but that doesn't really matter when you all you need is maybe 60% or 70% fan speed (which isn't nearly as loud).

Anyhow, with the prices that the 260 and 280 are going for, Nv shouldn't be getting knocked like they are by everybody, for all the reasons I just gave. People need to stop looking only at benchmarks taken at stock speeds (many of which I know can be inaccurate and/or misleading anyhow) and look at all the other aspects of these cards, all the stuff that makes up a good solid graphics card.

Theres several things that needs to be pointed out. The ATI cards are more efficient with their memory for one. Secondly, you cant have it both ways, saying they have a wider bus and more memory and say speed isnt as important, when we all know , its the speed of the memory that makes up for the wider bus. Also, Id like to point out youre refering only to the 512 models, not the 1 gig models

Because you have an SLi mobo, any upgrade should be a seccond card. You will get way more that way than a single different card. But you don't need to upgrade, the GTX 260 is a great card. When the time comes the GTX 260 will be cheap and when you SLi 'em you will have effectively upgraded to a top noch card for the price of a then old GTX 260.

Don't waste money "upgrading" to a slightly better card. Be happy! And when you aren't two years from now spend a little dough.

bingo ty JDJ, ppl do not seem to realize how video memory works or the fact that very little of what they think is used, is actually used IRL, and not synthetic benchmarking, which is good for reference but that's almost it...

I was irked a little bit when you mentioned this; to the best of my knowledge, the rule of thumb has always been the INVERSE... This is especially true when below the high-end cards, as evidenced by comparing the two GeForce 8600GT models, with either 512MB of DDR2 or 256MB of GDDR3; the latter has less memory, but is hands-down superior because it's clocked significantly faster; the benchmarks demonstrate this. I'm not trashing your whole argument here, I'm just pointing out this single discrepancy.

Given that all of one card model had 640MB, and only one GPU, with only two models that didn't wind up terribly common (due to price issues) had 768MB, I doubt that they'll ever actually recommend that much; they'll probably skip right up to saying 1024MB, just like they skipped 320MB.

Not quite so fast; while the 8800GTS 320MB has dropped in price to be close to the $100US mark, the 640MB version does remain a deal above it, even though its memory supply is but 25% larger than 512MB. It wasn't until much more recently that demi-affordable cards with above-512MB framebuffers made sense, starting with the larger-memory versions of the GeForce 8800GT and Radeon HD 3850; neither configuration, as I recall, launched with the GPU, but were instead later additions after the initial 512MB version.

And developers aren't actually in that much of a rush to use it, either; they know that no matter what they do on the PC, consoles, which tend to be much more lucrative, are restrained to the equivalent of 256MB of video RAM; quite literally on the PS3, and on the Xbox 360, they could at most squeeze the equivalent of a 320-384MB video card out, provided the non-graphics part of the game uses very little.

It isn't proper to consider a "factory OC" to be an actual overclock, since what the factory does is they cherry-pick GPUs that they can tell are more stable at higher clock speeds, set the defaults a bit higher, and brand them as such. It's more like a subset of a particular graphics card model, and hence, isn't a good comparison; those with vanilla GTX 280s will very likely NOT be able to achieve the sort of clock rates you get.

I feel much better - - - I'm really happy with it... no lag in cod4 what so ever.. .(just alittle when i first load the map - normal?)

That would not be something you could blame on the video card, no matter what causes it. I believe it's actually some CPU lag, as it transitions over from working on loading to working on actually running the game.

your golden man don;t worry about it, keep what you got as it still is an impressively powerful card, it will do the job fine.

I sold an 8800GT and bought a 4850.

Now I am having driver issues and can't get COD4 to run in a higher res than 1440x900.

ATI drivers SUCK.

No issues with my 2-9800GTX's in SLI on other computer.

I wanted to give ATI a chance and I am banging my head against the wall right now.

Just my 2 cents.

Try this driver

http://support.ati.com/ics/support [...] onID=35298

Nvidia drivers for vista 64 suck(8800gtx, many games perform poorly, corrupt random textures all over, freeze and lock the system), so i guess they are even.

So far the 4870 has run all the games that did not work properly with my other card. My 8800GTX will live on in an XP system

Depending on when you bought it, IMO, no.

Simple reason being the potential to step-up to the 55nm refreshes, which will really need to impress to regain control of pricing.

Personalyl I'd say stick with the GTX260 or else wait for the 55nm refresh. The 4870 is equally a waste, it's similar performance, slightly better features, but overall just more of a hassle (edit: just wanted to add I'm not saying that in general sense regarding the card, I'm saying an upgrade is a hassle not worthy of the difference).
If like you said in the first post the GTX260 plays what you want, then stick with it until it doesn't play what you want or until a killer deal on something that offers a signifcant performance boost.

As for why nVidia is hated by some, it's like M$, or intel, some of their practices rub people the wrong way (the list is lengthy for most companies really, except Matrox which is goodness and light incarnate ) , and also the 'king of the hill complex' people take pot-shots at #1 in every market. Some people also like to kick companies when they are feeling bad times (why the hate for ATi/AMD last generation?). And of course some is a backlash to that.

However alot of it is also justified criticism, main thing is to filter out the noise of Fanbois, FanATics and nVidiots, and focus on the facts as much as possible.

Huh?
So over time with future games you're going to be increasing your resolution and AA?

When it comes to playing future games, I'd put my money on memory saving methods than on just more space.
Those VRAM intensive situations you're thinking about will simply stress the VPU more too, so it's a position of diminishing returns without improvements like materials management, better buffers and geometry amplification, all of which don't favour the GTX260. The GTX260 isn't bad, but it's not more 'futureproof' if there were such a thing, and it's definitely not more forward looking.

Whose rule was that? If anything as mentioned the 'general rule' was the inverse (starting majorly IMO with the differences in the R8500 64MB vs 128MB models).
All you need to do is look at the 64bit, 128bit and 192 bit crippled models in the past to see putting a 1GB of memory on a crippled card doesn't always make it better than less faster memory.
Both have their tradeoffs for games & apps, and neither is always the most important, sometimes more memory will be more important, sometimes more speed will be more important.

Do you actually think 640MB will ever be recommened or even 768MB for that matter? Especially on cards with memory issues built into the GPU? If they're going to pick a 'recommended' level, they'll do one with more SKUs in that market, not pick something that reflect a very tiny market segment. Something that fits a midrange card's memory configuration like GF8600/HD2600 is more likely than either of those numbers as a recco. You might find that a game might use more than 512MB of memory, but it's unlikely that that would make a GTS-640 a better performer over an HD4870-512 when all the other features are weighed (remember the HD4K has higher texture fill rate, bandwidth and shader power, not just one thing). Based on your argument he should get an HD4850-1GB (which are selling now) because the recco eventually will be 1 GB and not the fraction thereof in the GTX260, or am I reading your argument wrong.

As for the rest, meh, you're just trying to validate your purchase more than anything.

Did you also notice that the HD4870CF & HD4850CF did worse than the single HD4870 with 512MB? Doesn't seem like it's just a memory issue there.
Did you also notice that the equal memory GF8800GT in SLi outperformed the GTX+ SLi and the GX2? Not really a great test of much there IMO other than SLi and CF problems.

Knowing ATi's past, I'd say that they are working on the memory optimizations for the HD4K and you would expect to see improvements in the next few releeases. Funny thing about last round was when the supposedly memory limited HD3870s outperformed their higher bandwidth and higher VRAM size counterparts at the memroy intensive tests. No granted, optimized design can only go so far and you hit a physical limit, but I wouldn't be so sure what's the limit on the CF right now, because as you could see from the above, it's not just memory alone that's at issue.