[citation][nom]dragonsqrrl[/nom]Mistaken? You're correcting a statement that was never made. I never suggested the GTS 250 performs on par with the HD4870. On the contrary, I actually said "the HD5770 performs roughly on par with the HD4870". I also said "on average these two cards perform just a few percentage points faster then the GTS 250", which in most cases is entirely true.Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be suggesting that there's a huge performance gap between the GTS 250 and the GTX 260 c216 (and therefore the HD4870) as well as other last gen high end cards, which is not true in most cases. Try double checking any reasonable number of benchmarks for popular games (Crysis Warhead, Far Cry 2, MW 2, etc...). Even when comparing to the GTX 285, there's certainly a large performance gap between it and the GTS 250, but it also isn't as large of a gap as you might expect from this sort of a comparison. It's certainly no where near 2x the performance, like one might expect. Given a good spread of benchmarks, the GTS 250 performs somewhere between the HD4850 and HD4870. And yes, on average it's just a few percentage points slower then the HD4870.This is all a very small portion of my previous comment and completely beside the point I was trying to make, regarding the performance and power consumption of the Mobility HD5870... just to keep this all in perspective.[/citation]
I am sorry for being tedious, but hd 4870/gtx 260 and to a degree the hd 5770 are faster than gts 250 by more than a few percentage points. If you said a few fps then it might be true. Think about it, sometimes a small fps difference can mean a much larger % difference.
Example: I am looking at Toms' 2010 charts and benchmarks for Battlefield Bad Company 2 (1920x1200, 0AA, 0AF, High Quality, DX10). The hd 5770 gets 36.2, gtx 260 gets 35.3 and gts 250 gets 32 fps. The fps difference is only about 4 between the hd 5770 and the gts 250, but the hd 5770 is 12.5% faster than the gts 250. Of course, this is only one game at one setting with outdated drivers (ATI cards would probably benefit the most with a driver update because it is a much newer generation).
All I want to say is that there are distinct fps performance categories. The HD 4870, gtx 260 and to a certain degree the HD 5770 are in a category which is significantly faster than the category below it(Hd 5750, hd 4850, gts 250, 9800 gtx +, hd 4770 and 8800 gts 512). While I don't like putting the hd 5770 in the same category as the hd 4870 and the gtx 260, due to its performance reducing memory bandwidth, the hd 5770 is much closer to the hd 4870 than the gts 250. And there is a significant performance difference (whether in frame count or %) between the hd 4870 and the gts 250.
NOTE: I own a 8800gt, and thus my comment is not influenced by the need to justify my ownership of any of the cards stated.