I'm not really sure if 2560 is really a RAM problem since most of those games are old, but yeah I tend to agree overall with the RAM thing.
GTX 285 was already a compute focused architecture, was it not? When they went to 1D ALU's was when I considered it. 285 to 480 was compute>>compute imo. I am sure there were plenty of changes and optimizations along the way but so where there from evergreen to caymen, or from any GPU to next. All these GPU's had HUGE dies for Nvidia and discussion at the time if Nvidia had focused too much on compute creating a lot of bloat for gaming performance.
The comparison wasn't unfair at all, as his assertion of a compute penalty being paid was proven unlikely by comparing a compute to a non compute arch, where the scaling was fine. He compared 7970 to a different arch, but the variable clearly wasnt necessarily compute.
As for the last part, huh? if anything the 285>480 transition would be more apt, since it was a refresh>new arch, like caymen>SI.
If that is the case it throws the whole "poor scaling" thing even more into question. I was operating on the incorrect assumption that Tahiti=2x transistor of caymen. I was wrong and it's actually 1.63X, which makes trinibwoy's case only look worse. Basically removes it nearly entirely. The scaling according to ever useful tech power up charts is tahiti=1.39X caymen (2GB) performance at 2560. You could probably chalk the other 24 percent up to use of lots of old, non-tesselated games benchmarks and unoptimized tahiti drivers, or close enough. Knowing that in heavy tess games like Crysis 2 Tahiti is 70% faster.
http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=quarterlyearnings
You can check the financial tables from there. Graphics have done ok lately, but is quite small compared to their CPU business in size and profit. Although The APU chips are counted in the CPU business despite containing GPUs. For nVidia the vast majority of revenue comes from GPUs, but you are right that the GPU-business does not look too healthy from looking at their numbers, although the latest year was profitable. Their profits come from the Quadro and Tesla lines of products. This is interesting...
I don't have much else to say to this except I like big siliconPerformance/size is good but performance alone is far better. Performance/watt is important, but within reason.
I like big silicon too, usually when AMD goes with small dies and performs well, I tend to think "gosh, think what they could have done with a big die!". It seems like missed opportunities. Overall it has worked okay for them though pretty consistently, including seemingly yet again with tahiti. It clearly can help with dual GPU card performance leadership too, for what that's worth, though I think single GPU performance crown is more valuable. Also, it seems to help them get product out faster, which is pretty big. Every day we go without an Nvidia answer to SI is a big win itself. Whether that's because of the small dies or completely unrelated though I dont know.
