AMD: R9xx Speculation

Well lets hope ATi get the 6970 boards out soon, I mean the year is almost over, and from Dec 20th pretty much the whole tech world goes on holiday until January. By my count that's just under 2 weeks for them to get it into reviewers hands and onto shelves.

 

It only makes sense though to compare with GTX 480 if the price is also similar.
And starting from today, the GTX 480 is dead. If they want to compare with a product slower than GTX 580 they will need to compare with GTX 570 (though I'm quite confident this will only apply to HD6950).
Don't forget choosing the "right" benchmarks with the right settings can make quite a difference - even if for instance the HD6970 would be 10% slower on average as tested by most review sites, AMD should still be able to present a decent collection of results where in fact it's a bit faster (and in this case it would very likely be cheaper).

 

If that was actually the case then why don't reviewers have samples?

Antilles is not comparable to a single chip solution, ever since the GX2 cards a lot of people don't bother (rightly or wrongly) with dual chip cards because of performance issues when there is no SLI/CF profile.

We also don't know how much bigger ATi have made Cayman to compete with Nvidia, I haven't kept up with the thread, but I haven't seen an article from Charlie boasting about how much smaller Cayman is compared to GF110 which leads me to believe it isn't...

 

Clearing out inventory depends on when ATi expected thier next gen to come out, if there was a push out on the date of release, it probably doesn't have to do with inventory of older products.

What makes you so sure nV won't have a dual GPU card this round?

And Ram is also a big cost to these boards, so its not just the GPU silicon that is expensive. And Caymen will probably be a bigger chip then what we have seen AMD use in recent history.

 

Mebbe because for some strange reason that shortly after reviewers get sampled that a ton of reliable leaks about the card suddenly occur?

I think AMD is holding back to not show their hand yet, I don't know what their hand is but that's just my gut feeling. I also see something in the allocation switch in the 6950/6970 numbers, but I think I'll hold on to that one for a bit to see what happens.

 

Some have them.

 

Its kinda useless to hold back now, nV already has their cards out, what kind of maneuvering will nV do, nothing , unless you think they can come out with a faster single GPU card, which is not going to happen. AMD has their launch set at a certain date for certain reasons, and not because of inventory of current cards nor anything that nV is doing. If it has something to do with nV's launch, they would release sooner so they can get more sales too.

 

I get that, but if the card is going to launch in the next week or so leaks aren't going to make much of a difference unless performance isn't up to scratch. I mean Nvidia have launched high end and high/mid range cards without a whisper from ATi. If Cayman Pro/XT were faster than their Nvidia counterparts I would, as ATi, be getting samples to trusted reviewers and asking them to leak the results to c0ckblock Nvidia. That we don't see Charlie and Co trashing GTX580 in favour of 'Sources tell me that 6970 is xxxxx' is some kind of sign that this one isn't as good as it should be.

My guess is that 6970 comes up under GTX580 and 6950 comes up under GTX570 but ATi are building up a massive inventory so they can launch below the stated price of each Nvidia card, probably $469 and $319 against $499 and $349.

By not saying anything, ATi are actually saying quite a lot, same as Nvidia around the time of GF100.

 

Yes, Damien has them:

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/811-22/dossier-nvidia-geforce-gtx-570.html

 

Is that 6970 as well, or just 6950 as was discussed earlier?

 

"les Radeon HD 6900" = "the Radeon HD 6900s"

So I'm guessing both.

 

nvidia also can clear out GF100 inventory with Workstation / Compute cards (some of them pretty much only require half the units working at half the clock too as a bonus...). Though as a potential customer I'd feel a bit cheated, you get the old, inferior product at a very hefty price premium, so maybe nvidia will introduce newer cards there too soon.

 

Thats all planned for depending on the launch of their new products. And I don't think nV can do that, since the geforce chips are laser cut and with certain features that can't be fixed to be used as a quadro chip.

 

Yeah! I too think the 6970 will come short of the 580 although they might win in game or two but overall short. I still believe AMD held back to increase core and memory clocks, no matter what Dave said, a small clock boost would not need extensive testing etc(imo). Even if it's 50 up on the core to 900 and 100 up on the memory, anything too try and get it close to 580 before launch. I think the 570 is what actually held AMD back because if it had better performance and competed with the 6970, AMD would be really crying atm. If it wins one or two vs the 6970 then AMD won't mind, just as Nvidia won't mind if AMD take one or two.

Then there's Nvidia's SC(SuperClocked) cards. We've seen the 580 SC and 460 SC. I'm betting on a 570 SC maybe taking a few more from the 6970.

This is of course all my own opinion and I could very well be entirely wrong. It's just a feeling I got.

 

You are never going to convince anyone this is in any way remotely similar to the woodscrew disaster that Fermi was, but you are welcome to try and keep spinning it that way.
AMD's competition has been themselves all along. They knew they had the fastest gaming card before the GTX580 launched. After the GTX580 launched they still have the fastest gaming card available (and cheaper than the GTX580 to boot). Everything else is, except for a few people in the know, uninformed rumors and speculation.

 

Not really that much faster though, the hd 5970 is only like 5% faster then the gtx580, and at the higher settings the gtx580 does better against the hd 5970. I think alot more people would want a one GPU card that can hold its own against a dual chip card any day, hence the price drop of the hd 5970.

 

If that was actually true then we would have seen a number of performance 'leaks'. By staying silent ATi are losing business, if they leaked the info of what you claim then people would have been more willing to stay on the fence and wait, of course you can't do that if your card sucks as it will damage your reputation and erode consumer good will.

 

Well the flip side of that is they also don't need to leak anything since speculation is based on previous years expectations, just builds the hype. Well aslong as it doesn't go too long!

 

I hate to be a downer but can't you be a little bit more optimistic?

 

Which ones are those?
The ones that are easily faked, make no sense, or are photoshopped?