[Ailuros]

I am not writing ATI off and I fully expect even a 512-bit memory bus or equivalent. My $1 saying they can shake it more than once.

I have severe doubts about that.

I personally never expected any significant performance increases from either/or IHV and their upcoming new batch of high end accelerators (successors to NV40/R480).

Yes I do expect something rather like 1.4-1.5*NV40 at best from either side. Official statement from Michael Hara on B3D's frontpage (2nd time I link to it in this thread):

“Well, from an architecture standpoint we’re just still at the beginning of shader model 3.0. And we need to give the programmers out there some time to continue to really learn about that architecture. So in the spring refresh what you’ll see is a little bit faster versions...

...I think you’ll see the industry move up a little bit in performance. But I don’t think you’ll see any radical changes in architecture. I doubt you’ll see any radical changes in architecture even in the fall. When we came out with GeForce 6, we tend to create a revolutionary architecture about every actually two years. And then we derive from it for the following time. So even the devices that we announced this fall, that will be I think a lot more powerful than the ones we actually had a year ago. Architecturally we’re still in the shader model three type era.”

How do you define exactly "a little bit"? The spring refresh should be aiming to compete against R520, while the 90nm fall part most likely against R580. I'd use terms like "huge" or "massive" for significant performance leaps instead of "a little bit".

Well, lemme tell ya, R520 better, because I won't be terribly happy buying one to only get NV40*1.4.

Both performance and feature-wise I guess that's exactly what you should expect IMHO.

If ATI is not going to use 90nm to their advantage, why use it at all?

Pumping up core frequency beyond 650MHz is actually a way of taking advantage of the manufacturing process in question. An alternative for the competition would be to use 110nm and more quads in order to reach equivalent fill-rates.

However I think both IHVs would have felt a lot better if GDDR4 f.e. would be available already.

***edit: I think that Wavey has already thrown a couple of hints around that as soon some details on both highly expected next generation consoles appear, those will be the most interesting material for related debates. I'd rather guess myself that this year won't bring any significant leaps technology-wise for desktop GPUs.