I'm just starting to wrap my head around RV770's performance and it's shaping up to be a nice part.
If I could briefly outline what I believe it is fair to say are the likely specifications of RV770 and the performance gains that could accompany it.
First and foremost let's discuss the ROPs and the impact the changes from RV670 to RV770 are likely to have on performance in scenarios which are wholely-limited by the performance of the ROPs.
1) 30% higher clock over RV670 - 775MHz -> 1050MHz
2) 2x Z-rate
3) restored AA resolve with 4 samples per cycle
Combine the 30% higher clockspeed with the doubled Z & AA rates and it becomes clear that up to 160% performance improvement can be realized in Z/AA-bound scenarios.
Next up comes the TMUs.
Pretty straight-forward here, unless ATi has done something more than just double the TMUs (and up the clock 30%) we're once again looking at up to a 160% performance increase, this time in texture-bound scenarios.
On to the shader processors.
This time we get a more modest 50% increase in functional unit count/instruction throughput, by way of 480 SPs. Once again thanks to that 30% upclock however, we actually realize up to a 95% performance increase (architectural changes and unknown "other" tweaks aside) in shader-bound scenarios.
Lastly comes RAM bandwidth.
This is sort of a mixed-bag. Compared to the GDDR3 version of RV670, RV770 will see a small bump in memory clock from 1.8GHz to 2.2GHz, resulting in 22% more bandwidth, up from 57.6GB/s to 70.4GB/s. Unfortunately though, this is actually a slight decrease in bandwidth from GDDR4-equipped RV670 (which operates @ 2.4GHz and provides 76.8GB/s). It remains to be seen if this will hold back the performance of the RV770. Given recent comments on these very forums I believe RV770 may very well be deserving of a 512-bit bus or at least some ~4GHz GDDR5.
So it all boils down to sort of a mixed bag... It has been stated that performance is up over RV670 at least 50%, which is certainly respectable. Let's just hope 50% is more of a worst case than an average, because 50% ain't enough to retake even the single-GPU performance crown. Nvidia already makes a $350 GPU that performs at least 50% better than the HD 3870 in most scenarios - the 9800 GTX. Don't take my word for it, read
this X-bit review for proof.
I have a feeling that the individual spec increases are going to lead to a lot more than just 50% performance gains in many common gaming scenarios. I'm just going to hope for the best. If nothing else, at least that gives NV incentive to get GT200 out the door ASAP and also gives price pressure for the GF9 series.
A dual-GPU RV770 + GDDR5 would be one badass graphics card.