AMD: R9xx Speculation

Rumored launch prices peg the 6970 at around $400-450. It has to at least be 30-40% faster over Cypress to compete with the GTX570. If not AMD would have a massive failure on their hands here.

 

You answered it yourself - if priced at $400-450, knowing the 570 and 580 are out, the card beats it unless AMD has gone insane and gone away from pricing their cards competitively

 

Barring some major supply shortages, the price will fall in line with performance. Free market economics etc.

 

Silly season seems to be at it's highest point. It's amazing we're this close to launch and much of the details are still unknown by most.

 

I'm reading about gtx 460 sli in a few places. Like nVidia has put the pressure on kind of reading.

Just using a bit of deduction, I'll assume they will be overclocked too. I mean why not, it's not like most of the review sites have any shame left.

So based on that, and this is purely a guess, I'm going to go for the 6970 being faster than the 580, maybe by 10%. nVidia is going to put overclocked sli'd 460's against it and try to convince us of price/performance superiority.

 

Indeed. Yet another masterful display of secrecy from AMD. That said, we do have the specs, or at least we think we do, but with a new architecture, this hardly tells us much about performance. Obviously, that was much less of an issue with, say, the GTX 580.

 

Did Apple buy AMD or something? It is amazing to be 5 days from launch with no hard leaks.

Edit: Damn them!

 

Hm, isnt that a wooden screw?

 

Spoiler

 

single slot?!?!? I had heard the thermals are low, but that's impressive.

 

No, as I pointed out earlier, it's the clitoris - expertly named as such over at xtremesystems.

 

What if that secrecy backfires?
Late with release, then if 6970 is not faster than 580, the perception will be "AMD lost this round".

 

Remember when graphics cards didn't even need heat sinks? How bout the first 8088's

 

RV770 was late too, it didn't "lose" either.

 

The answer to that is quite simple.

Cayman signs the comeback of single GPU enthusiast boards from AMD, so it doesn't have to be small, and in fact it had to be quite big unless sufficiently fast without that.

Now, what was "sufficiently fast" about one year ahead when Cayman was being summarized? My guess here is >50% faster than HD5870, which is more than what a GTX580 has to offer.

Even 50% faster is still quite a low target considering Cypress wasn't really considered as an enthusiast GPU.


I'll repeat it, but if Cayman finally reveals a small die with <GTX580 performance, even if the difference is small and with 10 watt power draw it'll be the result of a stupid decision. It's like using regular gasoline in a competition engine just to reduce cost, losing horsepower, considering "if all goes well, every other car will be wrecked during the race". On the other hand, the arch itself could be flawed, sucking power like nothing else or way too big... either way, it's not good.

 

Well in engineering, you can't really have it all - it's always going to be a tradeoff

I agree that they were probably within reach, but it's easy to second guess - the first (and so far last) time AMD reached > 400mm^2, we had a disaster - the question now is more of where the card stands in actual power draw, size, performance, etc. to not only the 580 but to other AMD products

 

Wait... what?
Why would Cayman need to be 15-25% faster than GTX570 to compete with it? Heck, 15-25% faster than GTX570 would be beating GTX580 already.
(Yes, GTX570 is indeed only bit over 10% faster than HD5870 on average (techpowerup, 11.76%))

 

It didin´t lose because 4870´s price was much lower than GTX 280.

6970 will cost the same as 4870?

I don´t think so.

 

Is it just me or in DX11 games with MAX settings the Nvidia´s cards fare much better in comparison to Cypress and Barts than this 10%.