I have gut feeling Jawed is right for most situations. But of course there probably are benches where RV770 reaches 2x. 3DMark06 for example .
Well if it has 32 TMU's, there you go. Of course Jaws doesn't believe that. I believe he's just being stubborn. I dont recall all floated specs being majorly wrong on a card launch this close to the day before. And they all say 32 TMU. Are we also going to question the repeatedly floated GT200 specs? Nope, they're pretty well established. Same should go for Rv770.
Anyways, so the theoretical gets you close to a doubling, 100% more TMU, 50% more shader, add some clock increase..now it's not a straight doubling, shaders lag, so you might see less than 100. But again, 1.25 9800GTX averaged 82% 4870>3870 faster in the review I looked at. That's what I'm looking for..1.8-2X.
There's no way I see that with 16 TMU. If Jaws is right he has to be hoping for more like 20-30% improvement at most, which would be suicide. That doesn't even get you close to 9800GTX..