This is quite telling picture from computerbase.de:
We'll see how drivers are going to help for smaller resolutions and settings.
So, that's actually worse than the other way around, isn't it? I'd think it would be easier to just have to throw more SIMDs at the problem than - well, apart from major reworkings it's only clock speed increases, that may help, no?
...just like 40% more expensive GTX580 offers
and if you won't ignore the rest, you'll notice, than in half of the tested games framerate is between 35-60 FPS at these settings...
I think people are being a little too harsh on this architecture.
1. Its a new internal architecture revision so driver maturity won't quite be as easy to achieve on launch whereas the GF110 was effectively a stone skip from GF100. You can expect some significant improvements.
2. It comes with something completely new in Power Tune. No other graphics card has it and the benefits throughout their range are obvious. You can save power and reduce noise or you can extend the limits and overclock within even more safe boundaries. If you buy a non referrence 6970 you can overclock without having to worry about corner cases and with even more consistant temperature settings. It is also transparant unlike temperature throttling which can vary due to ambient temps and the game.
3. The price/performance look more than adequate. It is hard to call either over priced. Maybe people are too used to the idea that an AMD card ought to blow nVidia out of the water in price/performance?
4. The overall quality of the cards are higher, you can get a nice $300 6950 with a vapour chamber. It has much better accoustic properties and you get 2GB of RAM so you mod lovers out there can use the really really good texture packs and gloat that consoles only have 1/16th of your total video RAM.
5. Dave still saves!
You're still not getting it. This is not a "delay", nor is it theoretical. It is the measured processing time for the workload of Dirt 2. Take any resolution as a base case. If I want to render a million more pixels, it takes 2.04ms longer on the 6970, but 2.36ms longer on the GTX 580. Vice versa for a million less. The 6970 is faster at rendering screen pixels in Dirt 2.
What other part of the workload is independent of resolution? I mentioned shadow maps and reflection maps as examples, but the fillrate part of shadow maps can be done 100x faster than screen pixels, so it's negligible, and reflection map pixels are either similar to screen pixels or simpler, so they won't be any slower on the 6970 than the GTX 580.
You can be front end limited without being geometry bound, Dirt 2 is one such title in fact (we looked at this quite a lot). Like I say, the dual geomtry engines are doing their stuff - look at any triangle or vertex test.
So, hmm, what is the problem? Ever since Cypress the chips just don't scale well to high end. I know you said geometry throughput isn't really a problem (and I guess you were right then
) but still, there is something in the frontend which prevents scaling. You could see that with the small difference more simds made (5850 vs 5870 at same clock was roughly a 2% difference in actual games), or with Barts (still almost same performance than Cypress despite it's cut down quite a bit) and now with Cayman (which has twice the geometry throughput, and it still didn't make a difference, except with games using tesselation).From that point of view, yes.
